Tag: Encounter

What Now?: New Creatures by God’s Grace

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

Continuing with our journey through Romans, we find ourselves in the first half of chapter 6. Here, Paul is addressing claims coming from the Corinthian church, specifically claims that if believers sin more than God’s grace abounds more. Paul is clear here, while we are justified by faith apart from works, we must not intentionally pursue sinful behaviors that drag and disrupt God’s revolution of the divine mission of love, life, and liberation in the world for the well-being of the neighbor to the glory of God. (Plus, we will have enough unintentional sin in our lives, we don’t need to pursue it!) We are, according to Paul, new creatures born of the waters of Baptism and are now defined by love, life, and liberation, and therefore voluntarily re-yoking ourselves to that which is indifference, that which is death, that which is captivity is not only anathema but also cut off.  

Romans 6:1b-11

Paul begins with a refutation of what is considered (by some scholars[ii]) to be a quotation from some at Rome, What then will we say? May we continue to sin, with the result that grace might superabound? Hell/ck no! We who have died to sin, how will we still live in it? (vv1-2). The question Paul asks in return is the driving theme of the chapter. It is also, especially for us, a crucial question for those who are justified by faith apart from works. Rather than the event of justification being a license to intentionally sin, it is an exhortation to live a new life. It is a gift given to be enjoyed—this is what the incarnate word is. Remember, back in chapter four, Paul gave a crystal-clear explanation of the gospel summarized by the events of Christ’s death and resurrection, [Jesus] was handed over for the sake of our trespasses and was raised for the sake of our acquittal/being pronounced justified/righteous (4:25). If we claim to believe in Christ, then we’ve come to the end of ourselves and have entered union with God by the power of the Holy Spirit. To intentionally return to the behaviors of the kingdom of humanity is to deny this belief and faith, it is to deny Christ and what Christ achieved for us because it is contrary to the very grace of God.[iii] In a sense, the claim Paul refutes makes God’s grace a human endeavor; for Paul, this is a μὴ γένοιτο! In the economy of God’s activity in the world and, especially, toward humanity, emphasis cannot fall on humans sinning to bring God’s grace. Rather, it must fall on God’s gracious activity in giving us God’s grace. Those who have been saved from the life of the dead are ushered into the life of the living and there’s no going back and certainly no human-centered way to make God’s grace abound more than it already is in Christ by the power of the Spirit. This is why Paul can then write,

Or are you ignorant that whosoever of us was baptized into Christ Jesus we were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him through the baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from death by the glory of Abba God, even as also we might walk in the newness of life (vv3-4).

Paul then explains more,

For if we have become grown together with [Jesus] in the likeness of his death, but also we will be [grown together with him in the likeness of his] resurrection. Knowing this that our old person was crucified together with [Christ] so that the body of sin might be abolished, so that we are no longer a slave to sin, for the one who dies has been declared to be righteous from sin (vv5-7).

Paul anchors the believer’s new life not in the old life and person of the kingdom of humanity, but in the new person who is of the reign of God and who identifies (by faith) with Christ’s death and resurrection. This new person is born from the trifold dipping of Christian baptism, marking the fullness of the invested Godhead and our identification with Christ in the tomb.[iv] For Paul, this is all the believer needs to cling to. The believer does not need to take matters into their own hands and cause God’s grace to manifest; God’s grace is (already) made manifest in their lives (in its fullness) because they believe. Now, it is also shared out and into the world as they proceed to live into their resurrected new life and leave the old person and body of sin to the kingdom of humanity (like: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead” Mt. 8:22, Lk. 9:60). These ones are grown together with (bonded to) Christ,[v] just as they were previously bonded to and grown together with sin and the old person. Therefore, they cannot return to the old way, old life, and old person. Again, Paul is refuting any notion that believers must return to sin to make God’s grace abound; the believer causes God’s grace to abound in the world as they live into their new life by the power of the Spirit and by faith in Christ and in union with God.[vi] (But they cannot cause God’s grace to become more present in their own lives than it already is by returning to sin.) Thus, believers become midwives of God’s grace by God’s grace and are encouraged and exhorted to go further and deeper into the world bringing God’s love and grace to all, especially the oppressed. Anyone who identifies with Christ by faith and baptism has identified with Christ in his death and will identify with him in his resurrection; herein is our justification: for the one who dies is declared righteous from sin. Sin is no longer in control and no longer boss (so, too, the law[vii]); God is now in charge of this new life, and Paul exhorts the Romans to live as such going forward and not backward. Saying,

Now, if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. Knowing that Christ, being raised from death, dies no longer, death no longer rules him. For he, he died, once for all he, he died to sin; but he, he lives, he, he lives to God. And in this way, you, you reckon yourselves to be dead to sin and living to/for God in Christ Jesus (vv8-11).

Conclusion

For Paul,[viii] Christ is the sacrament[ix]; it is Christ with whom we identify in both the waters of baptism and in the broken bread of the eucharist. It is not that water and bread are significant in themselves, but through them we come into contact with the dead and risen Christ; in partaking in these sacraments we identify in Christ’s three-day death and in his body broken; and as we identify so here, we can and will identify with Christ in his new life and bodily resurrection (today and tomorrow, present and future).[x] Further, to identify with Christ in his death—sacramentally and spiritually—means that we, too, like Christ our elder brother, are caused to be dead to sin, as in, sin no longer has dominion over us,[xi] eternal death,[xii] too, is rendered impotent for those who believe. (Because of Christ, death is dead, captivity is held captive, and indifference has met is own cold fate.[xiii],[xiv]) Sin’s stain and its consequence, death, are forever removed from the life of the believer;[xv] they are new creatures[xvi] (forever and daily[xvii]) no longer defined by sin but by God’s grace, no longer under the dominion of sin but under the reign of Christ.[xviii] No longer defined by death, but by life; no longer defined by captivity, but liberation; no longer defined by indifference but by love.[xix] We do not need to return…Nay! We cannot return to the sinful existence of the old person, of the kingdom of humanity; [xx] for God’s grace enters in anew every morning with God’s mercy.

Thus, we walk in all this newness, on the move because the Christian life is on the move because it is defined by Christ the gospel, defined by God and God’s Holy Spirit all of whom are always on the move looking for and seeking the beloved.[xxi]As those who identify with Christ by faith, we also identify with whom he identified: the lost, the unheard, the unvoiced, the ignored, the pushed off and pushed aside, the ones the society of the kingdom of humanity has deemed unworthy of love.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Martin Luther Lectures on Romans: Glosses and Scholia (1515/1516) LW 25 Ed. Hilton C. Oswald (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1972), 50. “…as falsifiers understand the passage, when they say, ‘Let us do evil,’ that is, let us commit sin, ‘That good may come’ (Rom. 3:8), that is, that grace may abound.”

[iii] LW 25: 50. “By no means, because this idea is absolutely contrary to the work of grace,..”

[iv] LW 25: 50-51. “…the threefold dipping of Baptism signifies the three-day death period and the burial of Christ, into Christ Jesus, that is, by faith in Christ Jesus…”

[v] Sarah Heaner Lancaster, Romans, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 108. “The kind of participation that baptism makes possible is an incorporation into Christ that is a secure joining for a thorough sharing, a kind of bonding.”

[vi] Lancaster, Romans, 107. “For Paul, baptism is s a clear sign of leaving the dominion of sin and entering the dominion of grace.”

[vii] LW 25: 308. “But he over whom sin reigns, no matter how he resists sin, is still under the Law and not under grace.”

[viii] LW 25: 310. “thus in this passage the apostle is speaking of the death and resurrection of Christ insofar as they refer to the sacrament, but not to the example.”

[ix] LW 25: 309. “For having put on our mortal flesh and dying only in it and rising only in it, now only in it He joins these things together for us, for in this flesh He became a sacrament for the inner man and an example for the outward man.”

[x] Lancaster, Romans, 108. “By being buried with Jesus, we are made participants not only in his death but also in his resurrection. To be united with him in death means also being united with him in resurrection (6:5).”

[xi] Lancaster, Romans, 107. “[Paul] describes sin’s power as ruling power; sin has dominion over us, enslaving us to its purposes and exercising influence over us as a kind of lordship. When we are under the lordship of sin, we are bound to submit to its influence.”

[xii] LW 25: 310. “Eternal death is also twofold. The one kind is good, very good.it is the death of sin and the death of death, by which the soul is released and separated from sin and the body is separated from corruption and through grace and glory is joined to the living God. This is death in the most proper sense of the word, for in all other forms of death something remains that is mixed with life, but not in this kind of death, where there is the purest life alone, because it is eternal life.”

[xiii] LW 25: 311. “Just as the death of death means to act against death, which is the same things as life, so the sin of sin is righteousness.”

[xiv] LW 25: 311. “Because for death to be killed means that death will not return, and ‘to take captivity captive’ means that captivity will never return, a concept which cannot be expressed through an affirmative assertion.”

[xv] LW 25: 310. “This is the way sin dies; and likewise the sinner, when he is justified, because sin will not return again for all eternity, as the apostles says here [v9]…”

[xvi] LW 25: 313. “The term ‘old man’ describes what kind of person is born of Adam, not according to his nature but according to the defect of his nature. For his nature is good, but the defect is evil.”

[xvii] LW 25: 314. “The meaning is that we must undergo this spiritual death only once. For whoever dies thus lives for all eternity. Therefore we must not return to our sin in order to die to sin again.”

[xviii] Lancaster, Romans, 107-108. “Those who have died to sin because they have been baptized into Jesus’ death. By participating in the death of Jesus, the follower of Jesus is dying to the lordship of sin and accepting the lordship of Christ.”

[xix] Lancaster, Romans, 108-109. “Dying to sin means that a person dies to an old way of life, and participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus means that a person enters a new way of life. The one who was crucified conquered death, and because we share in his victory, we are no longer enslaved to sin….The proper commitment to the new dominion in which we are privileged to live is to give up sin and live for God.”

[xx] Lancaster, Romans, 107. “To follow Jesus Christ means leaving the dominion of sin and living in the dominion of grace. If that is the case, then the follower of Jesus can no longer do the bidding of sin. By changing dominions, a person has changed lords and loyalties.”

[xxi] Lancaster, Romans, 109. “…new life in Christ is not static…Rather to walk in newness of life means to be on the move, to be ever attentive to what it means to live to God and to exercise our allegiance daily.”

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What Now?: Justified by Faith

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

Nothing makes me more excited about the lectionary than seeing Romans listed as the epistle reading. There’re a few reasons for this. First, the Letter of Paul to the Romans features significantly as one of the principle texts of Luther’s reformational insights thus is a “must read” for Protestant Christians generally and Protestant theologians specifically. Second, it’s a letter that has found itself the center of attention in momentous instances of church history and which finds import and context in the post-modern era; it’s a letter that transcends time and space, refusing relegation to the era of its inception. Still, if I were to stake my love of Romans on one specific characteristic it wouldn’t be the two reasons already given, though they feature significantly. It would be this: it’s the absolute best place to start when considering what Christians believe and why they (should) believe it. Romans takes us to the heart of the formation of Christian Doctrine in its most explicit and didactic capacity. Romans is the closest thing we have to a Pauline “systematic theology” built from and around profound development of a different strand of Jewish and rabbinic teaching resisting anti-Judaic and supercessionist trappings.

When considering all that has (quickly) transpired within the Christian metanarrative comprising the seasons and events from Advent through Trinity Sunday, it makes intellectual and faithful sense to pick up a text that essentially and qualitatively answers the question that is on the lips of any disciple on this Sunday: what now? So, in my opinion, there’s no better way to jump into “Ordinary” time than by jumping into the deep end of Christian thought with Romans! Considering the gospel passage from last week on Trinity Sunday, on this morning we, the baptized, enter the teaching phase of our annual Christian pilgrimage as we are made disciples of Christ (again) by the power of the Holy Spirit and to the glory God and for the wellbeing of the neighbor.

Romans 4:13-25

We open on Paul discussing promise and commandment. Paul explains, For the promise that he would be the heir of the cosmos did not come to Abraham or his descendants through the law but through justification of faith (v13). In Romans 4, Paul is building a case for the primacy of faith as the foundation of how one is made righteous (justified) before and by God. Here, in v. 13, Paul is using Abraham to demonstrate that Abraham received the promise of God not through a command but through faith that God is who God says God is. What precedes Abraham’s following God is Abraham’s trust in God.

Further, Paul writes, For if the heirs are to be such out of the law, faith has been made void and the promise rendered inoperative. For the law produces/brings about wrath; but where there is not law neither is there transgression/violation (vv14-15). Paul emphasizes that if the heirs of Abraham are made so by the law, then faith (as justification and righteousness before and with God) is emptied out, it is void and useless. Concurrently, if faith is made empty and useless, this means the promise is inoperative because one cannot believe in the promises of God through their own deeds; promises are believed and clung to by faith. God speaks and is considered trustworthy and honest or God is not—only faith can do this, recourse to works of the law is taking matters into one’s own hands and denies God God’s trustworthiness and honesty (essentially declaring God a liar). According to Paul, the law brings about something different than faith;[ii] where faith brings about the application of the truthfulness and trustworthiness of the promise of God, the law brings about wrath and the subsequent loss of the promise.[iii] This is basic civil and theological logic: without the promise, the law is forced to function in a way that it is not supposed to function. Synchronously, where there are rules and commands there is bound to be the breaking of rules and commands thus the presence of wrath exponentially increases in comparison to where there is no law or command. The law isn’t bad,[iv] but if the law is being used to justify oneself then it is being used badly and thus causes that which it does not want to cause (wrath).[v] For Paul, one can only be justified/made righteous before God by ascribing to God what is rightfully God’s—trustworthiness and truthfulness[vi]—and this can only be done by faith. Faith places the emphasis of promising and fulfilling where it belongs: with God.

This is why Paul can then say,

For this reason [justification is] from faith, so that in order to secure the promise according to grace to all the descendants, not only to the ones from the law but also to the ones who [share] from the faith of Abraham—who is the parent of all of us, just as it has been written, ‘I have made appointed you the Parent of many nations—in the presence of God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and the one who calls the things that are not as being (vv16-17)

For Paul, Abraham receives the promise of God by faith thus opening access to the promises and who can be grafted into this promise of God to Abraham for the wellbeing and benefit of the entire cosmos. The promise received by faith means that anyone can believe and, if this, then anyone who encounters the promise and believes is then grafted into Abraham’s family without everyone having to become a member of one nation. If by law, then the cosmos and everyone/thing in it collapses into one nation which is antithetical to the trajectory of the gospel proclamation—while aiming to make one body of Christ, gospel proclamation and hearing is not a nation making enterprise. The promise is that Abraham will become the parent of many nations, not one singular nation. The God who made such a promise is the God who calls the dead to life and who calls into being that which isn’t; this is not a God who is bound by human legalism or the designs of superiority and nationalism that are characteristic the kingdom of humanity and its death dealing and destruction making ways.

Paul then writes,

Beyond hoping in hope, [Abraham] believed with the result that he would become ‘the parent of many nations’ according to that which has been said, ‘In this way your descendants will be.’ And not weakening in faith he took note of his own body having been deadened—beings somewhere around a hundred years old—and taking note of the deadness of Sarah’s womb. Now toward the promise of God Abraham did not dispute but being empowered by/in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that which God has promised God is able also to do (vv18-21).

For Paul, Abraham features as not only the progenitor of God’s chosen people, but also as an example of one who is justified by faith apart from works of the law. For Abraham and all his descendants, being an heir is something that comes by faith and not by legal law adherence.[vii] Paul presses an important point here: justification and righteousness is through trusting and deeming truthful the God who made the promise (back in Gen 12-17) and as such justification and righteousness are of God who deems one worthy based on faith and not on birth, or pedigree, or nationhood, or skin-color, or sex and gender, or any legal law adherence.[viii] If it is by these things then faith is rendered useless and the promise would be inoperative (neither faith nor the promise would matter). If it is by these things then humanity can boast; but humanity, according to Paul, cannot boast because justification and righteousness are the doings of God and not of us (Paul emphasizes that Abraham’s trust was in God and not in his own strength for his body and that of Sarah’s was deadened; therefore Abraham cannot boast in himself but only in God.[ix]) And because this is all of God and by faith, the promise of God to Abraham can transcend time and space, boundaries and boarders. For Paul, Abraham’s trust in God and his considering God trustworthy and truthful, Wherefore [his faith] was reckoned to him as righteousness/justification (v22).

Conclusion

As it was for Abraham, so it is for all those who come after Abraham and are encountered by God’s call through God’s word in the event of faith.[x]

Now, ‘it was reckoned to him’ were not written for the sake of Abraham only but for us also to whom it comes so that it is reckoned to us, the ones who believe upon the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over for the sake of our trespasses and was raised for the sake of our acquittal/being pronounced justified/righteous (vv23-25).

The beginning of our journey as disciples of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit is built on faith and not on works of the law—no matter how great those works can be. Our union with God and our being grafted into the body of Christ is done by faith alone and not by any works. All of this is a gift of God, something we did not earn through our birthright and/or merits. Paul at the end of our passage drives home how no one, not one person, is exempted from the death of Christ: we are all guilty. And if this is so, then we are all under the condemnation that comes with breaking the law. (Not only have we broken a law, in the death of Christ we caused the entire law to fold in on itself; no work of ours, no law obedience of ours can remedy that catastrophe.) And if this is also so, then we are trapped in captivity to our condemnation, unable to extricate and liberate ourselves. Jesus’s death and resurrection from the dead is God’s activity on our behalf to liberate us and set us up before God as justified and righteous.[xi] This is the fulfillment of the promise from Gen. 12-17 and it is accessible to us only by faith. So, as we begin (again) to believe in Jesus’s resurrection from the dead and his ascension to heaven releasing the divine Spirit among us, we see that our resurrection (present and future) is dependent on the same faith and trust Jesus had in God. And even as we are rendered unto dust in awakening to our guilt, we are brought into new life by our faith and dependence on Christ, in faith affirming God as trustworthy and truthful, and here we are given (again) hope in this God who creates and recreates,[xii] accounting us righteous and justified by faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] LW 25:278. “For the Law and faith deserve opposite things.”

[iii] LW 25:278. “That is, the Law merits wrath and the loss of the promise, but faith deserves grace and the fulfillment of the promise…”

[iv] LW 25:279. “Thus, the Law works wrath, that is, when it is not fulfilled, it shows the wrath of God to those who have failed to provide for its fulfillment. Thus the Law is not evil, but they are evil to whom it was given and to whom it works wrath, but to others (that is, the believers) it works salvation; actually it is not the Law that works this but grace. Therefore, if the promise were through the Law, since it works wrath, it would follow that the promise is not a promise, but rather a threat. And thus the promise would be abolished and through this also faith.”

[v] Sarah Heaner Lancaster, Romans, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 85.

[vi] LW 25:40 “For if God promises and there is no one who believes Him when He promise, then surely there will also be no promise of God and no fulfillment, for it has been promised to no one, since no one has received it. Therefore faith ratifies the promise, and the promise demands faith in him to whom it is made.”

[vii] Lancaster, Romans, 85. “Inheritance is clearly a gift. It is not something owed because of adherence. Because this inheritance is not a matter of legal adherence, all Abaham’s descendants (Jew and Gentile) can receive this gift because the faithfulness of Abraham is a possibility for all of them.”

[viii] LW 25:280. “If seed and physical generation were enough to justify an to make people worthy of the inheritance, it follows that faith is not necessary for justification and or worthiness of that kind, since he who is righteous and worthy needs neither justification nor worthiness.”

[ix] Lancaster, Romans, 86. “Because he cannot boast in his own achievements, Abraham is in a position to honor God alone, as God should be honored. God reckoned Abrahm’s faith as righteousness not because of Abraham’s own glory, but because Abrahm glorified God.”

[x] Lancaster, Romans, 87. “Paul asserts that just as this faith was counted on Abraham’s behalf, our faithfulness to the same God  (who did another outrageous thing by raising Jesus from the dead) will be counted as righteousness for us.”

[xi] LW 25:284. “The death of Christ is the death of sin, and His resurrection is the life of righteousness, because through His death He has made satisfaction for sin, and through His resurrection He has brought us righteousness. And thus His death not only signified but actually effects the remission of sin as a most sufficient satisfaction. And His resurrection is not only a sign or a sacrament of our righteousness, but it also produced it in us, if we believe it, and it is also the cause of it.”

[xii] Lancaster, Romans, 86. “The God who creates is the same God who resurrects. This God has power over death and nothingness, and so this God is worthy of our hope.”

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persona semper reformanda est

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

The Christian journey into God should be marked by the many deaths we walk through with Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. Wherever we’ve encountered Christ in the event of faith anew demands both a death to what was before the encounter and a rebirth into what will be after that encounter. God, being dynamic and not static, is always on the move and we, being found in Christ by the Spirit and thus located in God, should always be on the move, too; this will demand our periodic and recurring death and rebirth as we make contact with what we’ve not known or experienced before in and with God.

Ecclesia semper reformanda est. The church is always reforming. But this only happens if we intimately embrace persona semper reformanda est (a person is always reforming). We, individual Christians who make up God’s Christian church, are the ones who must change for the church to change. This means, wholeheartedly embracing that love requires risk and a new life means new thoughts and new actions in the world.

The bad news is, we don’t like to change; we like what we know and are familiar with. Thus, we elevate what makes us comfortable to the seat of God, hold ourselves (and others!) captive to what was, and halt any movement forward (sometimes calling it “tradition”). Even worse, when things become turbulent, we often clamor to go backwards to shores recognizable and mundane. However, and this is the good news, God, per above, is always on the move and eager to usher us into God’s self-disclosure thus giving us plenty of opportunity for the persona semper reformanda part. Our part in that encounter with God by faith in Christ is by the power of the Holy Spirit, but we can stall it, ignore it, and even prevent it if we lack humility, trust, and love.

1 Peter 1:17-23

In the epistle passage, Peter sets up a dynamic correlation between our faith and trust in Abba God through Christ and our living in and by love as new creations. Our faith and trust are grounded in a God who ransomed us from captivity through the precious body of God’s self thus we can hand ourselves over (entirely) to this God and allow ourselves the genuine risk of loving deeply those around us. As new creatures, says Peter, we can live in a new way, with awe and not fear,[ii] trusting that the very one who ransomed us from futility will see us through all that comes.

Peter begins, And if you appeal to the one who judges without respect for persons according to their own deeds as parent, behave in reverence during the time of your sojourning as strangers (v17). For Peter, to call God “Father”/”Abba” or by any other intimate relational term (“parent”, “elder,” “caregiver”) simultaneously demands a way of living in the world that is different from the way one would live if they did not call God thusly. Peter is certainly and heavily implying that there should be a “like parent, like child” correlation. There should be genetic similarities between the one who is the Creator and the one who is so created by the Creator. Christians, those who are created by the Creator through the encounter with God in the event of faith, should be the ones who carry traits of their Creator into the world.[iii] In other words, the world and those around us should be able to experience aspects of God’s self-revelation in the world through us and our words and deeds. This includes judging without respect for persons according to their own deeds… As in, those of us who have this Judge as Abba should be slow to judge others since we are now, because of Easter and through faith in Christ, in life and not in death because of our sins, thus finding ourselves on the other side of condemning judgment.[iv] And, none of this because of our own deeds, for God did not judge us according to our deeds since our God, Abba God, is the one who doesn’t so judge a person.

Peter underscores our creaturely status in the world living by faith by anchoring our liberation from death and sin in Christ’s (genuine) sacrificial ransoming of us from captious eternal fates and states.[v] Peter writes,

You have perceived that you are ransomed out of the inherited conduct of your ancestors not by perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like a blameless and unblemished lamb, having been known beforehand before the conception of the Cosmos, but now being revealed at the end of time for your sake [that] through [Christ] [you are/can be] believers in God—the one who raised him from death and gave to him glory—so then your faith and hope is in God (vv18-21).

For Peter (and the culture around him, not to mention First Testament theology), redemption is accomplished by payment of a ransom.[vi] Peter is using this imagery to highlight and emphasize the cost[vii] of this new life the believers have by faith and how they are liberated[viii] from the useless[ix] ways they inherited from their ancestors—from which they could never escape of their own powers.[x] Peter’s ultimate concern here is that the believers do not take their redemption for granted; to prevent this they must remember it’s cost and that their liberty from uselessness is not of their own doing.

Thusly, these believers are expected to live differently in the world in a way that is toward God and reeking of gratitude for God’s action on their behalf;[xi] they are expected to live as the new creatures they are, ransomed as they were, liberated and freed from uselessness[xii] for usefulness (usefulness of the reign of God). So, Peter, closes with, Having purified your soul by the obedience of truth into genuine siblingly love, you love fervently one another having been begotten again not out of perishable seed but imperishable, through the living and abiding Word of God (vv.22-23). For Peter, the believers have “purified souls” through their obedience to the truth of the “living and abiding word of God.” In other words, they are expected to have new desires, new thoughts, and (as a result) new ways of living in the world.[xiii] Faith in Christ by and through hearing the truth of the Gospel will change the one who hears and this change will be more than just internal, it will be external (mind and body).[xiv] This necessarily starts with loving those around them,[xv] specifically other believers. But not only this; they will pour out that sibling like love for one another into the world toward the neighbor who is as stuck as they once were, and acting toward and for them in ways that emphasize their wellbeing in the world and not their own to the glory of God.[xvi]

Conclusion

Peter speaks to us, today. He speaks to us as those who have just come through the resurrection event of Christ and are encountered by the risen Christ on our way to look for the living among the dead. We aren’t addressed as those who were once saved many years ago or those baptized even earlier. Peter addresses us as those who are newly encountered by the movement of God causing earthquakes and rolling back massive stones. We are new! This morning, we believe again, what was is of the dead and meant to stay behind in the tomb like useless funeral linens. But what lies ahead of us is life and living in new ways, thinking new thoughts, having new desires and expectations. Because of Easter, we are called by the angel of God to be new in the world; we are, by faith again in Christ again, embarking on our own persona semper reformanda est because this is what faith causes the believer to do and because this is what is expected when you follow a living Christ and not a dead one, when you are inspired by a loving divine Spirit and not an indifferent one, when you are united to the God of always-liberating and not to a god who desires your always-captivity.

Beloved, once again we must hold fast to our Easter Sunday experience and see that we, too, are no longer dead but living, no longer captive but liberated, no longer caught in indifference but surrounded by love…by a Love that moves us toward each other, toward others outside of these walls, and then toward our selves who are found and grounded in Christ. We do not need to be afraid to live differently in the world, Peter exhorts us. We live in awe of the work of God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit on our behalf and on behalf of the whole world. We should be the ones who dare to participate in God’s mission in the world of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation into a world whose industry is just the opposite. We’ve been redeemed from our uselessness for our usefulness; to go any which way but forward into the new, to deny our divine state of semper reformanda is to deny Christ lives now. And, Beloved, we are no longer creatures of death, but of life!

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Peter H. Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, TNICTNT, ed. F.F. Bruce (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 71. “Their reverential awe before God, however, is not based simply on their recognition of judgment, but on deep gratitude and wonder at what God has done for them.”

[iii] I. Howard Marshall, “1 Peter,” The IVP New Testament Commentary Series, eds. Grant R. Osborne, D. Stuart Briscoe, and Haddon Robinson, (Downers Grove: IVP Press, 1991), 54. “Christians are not in a position where it doesn’t matter how they live because they believe in Christ and all will be forgiven at the last judgment. On the contrary, they should live in this world, filled with its temptations, with reverence for God in the face of his judgment.”

[iv] Marshall, “1 Peter,”  53-54. “The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples and that was used in the early church addresses God by this name [Abba]…But those who address God in this way must remember who [God] is. As Father [God] does not cease to be judge.”

[v] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 54. “…Peter now introduces a deeper motive for Christian conduct in the fact of redemption. The picture is of people who were in bondage but have now been set free.”

[vi] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 54. “Redemption generally takes place by the payment of a ransom.”

[vii] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 55. “Redemption from bondage was possible only by the payment of a ransom price. Peter wants to emphasize the great cost involved, so he points out that the ransom was not paid with precious metals like silver and gold, which despite their durability are not of lasting worth, but rather with the blood of Christ which is generously costly. He contrasts material wealth and a person’s life, and the contrast is enhanced because it was the lifeblood of Christ that was spilled.”

[viii] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 54. “The former state of the readers was one of bondage—bondage to a particular way of life inherited from their ancestors.”

[ix] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 55. “The old way of life is characterized as empty, lacking in purpose and leading to no good results.”

[x] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 55-56. “Peter is saying that the readers were caught, with no possibility of escape, in a futile way of life that would end in condemnation from the Judge who judges everybody according to their works. Chrit’s self-offering to God as a sacrifice, however, constituted the ransom price by which they were set free from the old way of life and brought into the new life of the children of God.”

[xi] Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, 75. “It is God who takes the initiative and enables the human response of commitment. But the commitment is directed toward God, specifically because of his raising Jesus from the dead and glorifying him.”

[xii] Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, 71-72. “This ‘way of life,’ which includes not just their religious beliefs but also their ethical values and actions was ‘empty,’….worthless, futile, and empty of hope and value when viewed in the light of the gospel.”

[xiii] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 59. “The way in which he says that they have purified their souls…suggests the actual purification of their inner nature, which will issue in new motives, thoughts and actions. This cleansing has taken place through their obedience to the truth…The truth is the gospel, both with its promises and its demands, so that he intends not just an assent to the message but also the commitment to live by it.”

[xiv] Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, 76. “The truth is the gospel…and obeying the gospel indicates that conversion is not simply a matter of intellectual change, but of a transformation of behavior, that is, response to a command….”

[xv] Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, 76. “The result of conversion is ‘sincere love for your fellow-Christians.’”

[xvi] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 60. “If the ideal is that Christians should love their brothers, then let them love one another. Get on and do it. This is a clear and direct command. We must take action without ifs and buts. Peter assumes that Christians can and must love one another.”

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Clothed in Divine Righteousness: Easter Sunday!

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

On Friday, we bore the crushing weight of being utterly exposed; we felt the shame of being stripped down, our few fig leaves ripped from our bodies.[ii] On Friday, we viscerally felt the depth of our fragility,[iii] our unsafety,[iv] our hurt,[v] our lostness,[vi] and our guilt.[vii] On Friday we gazed long in the mirror and what was reflected back terrified us, angered us, grieved us, made us anxious, and was detestable to us; what we saw on Friday was that we are hopeless, helpless, lifeless, groundless, and ruthless creatures who lie to themselves, preferring to kill an innocent man than attend to the infection of the mythology of control we’ve grown quite drunk on. On Friday, we were abandoned to ourselves, left to our errant judgments, and found ourselves held captive in the tomb of arrogance and desperation, tombs we’ve constructed for ourselves, tombs we are unable to escape from because we are so curved in on ourselves. On Friday we were sealed in darkness and left for dead, alienated and isolated from God, from others, and from ourselves.

But then…God.

Today, where there was darkness there is now light, where there was death there is now life. This morning, the exposure we felt on Friday becomes the warm light of the risen Son, bringing us into himself, into the lap of Abba God, and wrapping us up like newborn babes in the heated blanket of the Holy Spirit. God sent death and his siblings packing because nothing stands between God and God’s beloved, not even death.

This is the goal and trajectory of God’s love: bringing that which is dead back to life, that which is encased in darkness into the light, that which is curved in on itself and loveless into belovedness. Today the oppressive burial linens of fragility, unsafety, hurt, lostness, and guilt are pulled off and we find ourselves dressed in the divine clothes of divine grace, mercy, kindness, joy, and righteousness. As God calls Jesus from the tomb, so does God call us from our self-imposed tombs. As Jesus is raised to life out of death, so, too, are we raised out of death into new life, new hope, new help, on to a new ground, with new confidence not in ourselves but in God, in love, in life, and in liberation. This morning, in our encounter with the risen Christ, our terror is quelled, our anger is released, our grief met with divine comfort, our anxiety gives way to peace that surpasses all understanding, and our detestable state is exchanged for cherished. And all of this as a gift from God to us through Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit; all of it dependent on God’s never-stopping, always and forever, unconditional love for us.

Happy Easter! Christ is Risen!!

Matthew 28:1-10

Matthew opens on the tomb. Unlike the Gospels of Mark and Luke,[viii] there is little movement here. Matthew begins at the tomb with the women Mary already there, Now late on the Sabbath as it was dawning into the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look on the tomb[ix] (v.1). As the women are already there, they know the tomb is sealed because they can see it. They are not planning to do any funeral and burial rituals; for them, what’s done is done. For Matthew, these women are not professing prodigious faith; they are there to confirm that Jesus is dead,[x] secured and sealed in the tomb, the supposed divine mission of God ended. However, God’s ways are higher than human ways: the last shall be first…[xi]

Matthew then tells us,

And, behold!, a great earthquake happened; for an angel of the Lord came down out of heaven and approaching rolled back the stone and was sitting upon it. Now the angel’s appearance was as lightening and their outer robe [was] bright as snow (vv. 2-3).

The Marys who were prepared for darkness and death find themselves immersed in the presence of the divine light, witnessing divine activity overhauling human space and time, folding death in on itself.[xii] As the male guards began shaking and (ironically[xiii]) became as corpses (v.4), the women hold ground through the earthquake caused by the angel’s arrival to roll back the stone.[xiv] Unphased by the men who are now on the ground and, thus, out of the picture,[xv] the angel of God addresses the women,

“You, you do not be afraid! For I have perceived that you are seeking Jesus, the one who has been crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said. Come and see the place where he was laid. And quickly go and tell his disciples, ‘he has been raised from the dead, and, behold!, he goes before you into Galilee, there you will find him.’ Behold! I told you (vv.5-7).

Those who were last at the cross become the first at the tomb;[xvi] those who were last in the economy of the kingdom of humanity become the first in the economy of the reign of God. The discipleship of the risen Jesus does not start with men minding their own business, but with grieving women coming to confirm death; the Marys, for Matthew, become the first witnesses to the resurrection of their beloved Jesus.[xvii] As they look in the tomb, as they see emptiness, as they remember that the stone was there when they arrived,[xviii] the Marys become the first to experience life amidst death. these humble ones get to be the divinely chosen preachers of the good news: Jesus lives![xix] Where they expected to find a dead body already in decay, they find the presence of God and the altering of history forever in the victory of life over death. [xx] And it is about this victory they are commanded to declare to the disciples with the authority of heaven behind them.[xxi]

And so, as quickly as they could, they left … from the tomb with fear and great joy and they ran… (v.8a). Matthew could have stopped here like Mark did in his Gospel; but Matthew doesn’t.[xxii] The women are eager to convey the divine message to Jesus’s disciples (v.8b), but God has another gift to give. Matthew tells us, And, behold!, Jesus encountered the women saying, ‘Rejoice!’ (v.9a). Just in case they might be doubting what just happened, Jesus shows up and greets them. What they saw back at the tomb wasn’t a figment of their imagination; Jesus is raised,[xxiii] Jesus lives.[xxiv] The event is so real, in fact, that they drew near [to Jesus] and held fast his feet and bowed down to him (v.9b). This was no ghost,[xxv] this was no figment of their imagination; Jesus stood before them, talked to them, and they grabbed hold of his feet.

As they are genuflecting, Jesus exhorts them, echoing the words of the angelic messenger of God, “Do not be afraid! Go your way and proclaim to my brothers so that they may go into Galilee, and there they will see me” (v.10). Jesus refers to the disciples as “brothers”; those who failed Jesus, those who betrayed him, those who denied him, those who ran and hid, those who are still hiding, are declared “brothers” and not merely “disciples” [xxvi] Divine victory of life over death eclipses the existential death the disciples are experiencing as they are still held captive in the oppression of darkness, of silence, and of guilt. In the raising of Jesus, God’s mercy, grace, love, kindness, and forgiveness come pouring out of that tomb rather than the stench of decay, decomposition, and death. As Jesus walks the earth in his resurrected state, life, love, and liberation are on the move.

Conclusion

To us who are exposed and found naked, not in control, fragile and hopeless, unsafe and helpless, hurt and lifeless, lost and groundless, and guilty and ruthless we are given, this morning, Christ himself—all of him—so that we never again find ourselves trapped in our self-imposed tombs. For us who find comfort in the consistency of our terror, we received an assurance like the Marys holding Jesus’s feet! For us who find ourselves addicted to our anger, we are beckoned in divine pleasure and given celestial joy through the resurrected Christ, the incarnate word of God’s love for the world. For us who know the weight of grieving, we are heralded into divine comfort in the surety of God’s presence always with us in Christ, the very one who overcame death with life. For us who are suffocating under anxiety, we receive peace that surpasses understanding. For us who find ourselves stuck in detest, we find ourselves cherished.

Today we’re given something completely new,[xxvii] completely different, completely strange to the kingdom of humanity. We are given life, love, and liberation. And while we benefit from this, we are given these things specifically so we can participate in God’s divine mission of the revolution of love, life and liberation in the world for the God’s beloved. We are refused the option of living as if we’ve not heard, seen, felt, tasted, smelled the good news. We are charged to take up the way of Christ and live as if the Cross isn’t the end of the story but the beginning. Today, we’re not the same as we were yesterday morning; today we’ve encountered an empty tomb and heard the announcement from the heavenly realm: he is not here; he has been risen! How could we ever live in the old way?

Today, our willful and chaotic self-determination collides with the steady path of Christ. Today we live under the weight that Jesus’s resurrection is not an event isolated to the past or retained for some future time, but is right now.[xxviii] We must hear our summons to go! and proclaim! in word and deed, not only telling but living in such a way that Jesus’s resurrection—thus life’s victory over death—is real for those most threatened by a world on fire, by leaders consumed with their own well-being, by institutions and systems hardwired to consume them. This morning, we, too, are resurrected and called out of our tombs to go and live radically and wildly in the name of God and for the well-being of your neighbor and to do so in a way that brings God glory and might get you in a little bit of good trouble. You’ve been summoned into life not death, into love and not indifference, into liberation and not captivity.

Today, we live because Jesus is alive, [xxix] we love because Jesus is love, we are liberated because death is no match for life.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/02/18/exposed-and-naked-we-are-not-in-control/

[iii] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/02/22/exposed-and-naked-we-are-fragile/

[iv] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/03/08/exposed-and-naked-we-are-unsafe/

[v] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/03/22/exposed-and-naked-we-are-hurt/

[vi] https://laurenrelarkin.com/?p=7127

[vii] https://laurenrelarkin.com/?p=7130

[viii] R. T. France The Gospel of Matthew The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Gen. Ed Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 1097. Four distinctive features of Matthew’s account: “…the earthquake, the angel rolling away the stone, the effect on the guards, and the women’s meeting with Jesus himself on their way from the tomb.”

[ix] Τάφος

[x] Case-Winters, Matthew, 336. “It was not uncommon for friends to come and wait by a tomb incase an apparently dead person should revive. This might continue as far as the third day. The effect of these visits was to confirm death.”

[xi] Case-Winters, Matthew, 336. “Waiting and watching in sadness, they have become the first witnesses to the resurrection. Once again the last are first. They are also first to worship the risen Lord.”

[xii] France, Matthew, 1099.

[xiii] France, Matthew, 1100. “Note the irony that those assigned to guard the corpse themselves become ‘corpses,’ while the on they guarded is already alive. The attempt at human security has been neutralized, and the guards play no further part in the scene until they have to report back in vv. 11-15.”

[xiv] France, Matthew, 1099. “…here the removal of the stone form Jesus’ tomb is attributed not to the earthquake but to the direct action of an angel. Indeed, Matthew’s connective ‘for’ suggest that the quake is itself the result, or at least the context, of the angel’s coming, so that emphasis falls on the angel rather than the earthquake.”

[xv] France, Matthew, 1100.

[xvi] Anna Case-Winters Matthew Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 336. “‘Last at the cross, first at the tomb,’ the women have come to watch.”

[xvii] Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, translated by Donald D. Walsh (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 618. “I: ‘In those times nobody paid much attention to women. And that’s why those women maybe didn’t run any risk, as Laureano says. Their role was only to go and weep and then embalm the body of Jesus. A humble role. But this Gospel assigns them a more important role: they were witnesses to the resurrection.’”

[xviii] France, Matthew, 1097-1098. “The action of the angel in removing the stone from the entrance to the tomb draws attention even more clearly than in the other gospels to the fact that Jesus has already left the tomb, while the stone was still in place.”

[xix] France, Matthew, 1101. “The women are not only themselves the witnesses of the empty tomb, but also the chosen messengers to convey the amazing news to Jesus’ male disciples.”

[xx] Cardenal, Solentiname, 619. “I: ‘The important thing about this story is that they find an empty tomb. They were arriving to embalm a corpse and there wasn’t any corpse.’”

[xxi] France, Matthew, 1101. Angel’s last words to women “reminiscent of the frequent TO formula, ‘The Lord has spoken’….The formula marks an authoritative pronouncement (perhaps even that the agnel speaks for God), and functions now as a call to action. The message has been delivered, and now it is up to the women to act on it.”

[xxii] France, Matthew, 1097. “Matthew’s account of the empty tomb is thus, like his account of the death of Jesus, more dramatic than Mark’s and supplies the surprisingly missing element in Mark 16:1-8, an actual encounter with the risen Jesus.”

[xxiii] France, Matthew, 1098. It’s “…a demonstration that Jesus has risen….What matters to the narrators is not when or how he left, but the simple fact that now, early on Sunday morning ‘he is not here’…”

[xxiv] Cardenal, Solentiname, 619. “Maria: ‘And afterwards he appears before them and shows them that he’s alive.’”

[xxv] Case-Winters, Matthew, 336. “The women ‘took hold of his feet.’ This latter establishes not only their posture of worship but that this resurrection appearance had ‘feet’—this is not a ghost.”

[xxvi] France, Matthew, 1103. The disciples become Jesus’s brothers, “The concept itself is not new….This time, however, it follows the abject failure of the Twelve to stand with Jesus when the pressure was on, a failure which was hardly less shameful because Jesus had predicted it in 26;31. But now it is time for the second half of that prediction to be fulfilled…and that Galilean meeting will eventually restore the family relationship which they must surely have thought had come to an end in Gethsemane.”

[xxvii] Cardenal, Solentiname, 621. “William: ‘Resurrection is a new life, not the prolonging of this life.’”

[xxviii] Cardenal, Solentiname, 621. “Laureano: ‘What’s important is for us to live resurrection here, right now, and for us not to believe, as many have believed, that this world doesn’t count, that what counts is to go to heaven afterwards and all that nonsense.’”

[xxix] Cardenal, Solentiname, 621. “I: ‘It’s certain they they’ve put Jesus resurrected in heaven, in another life, in the blue beyond, so that the earth will go right on being the same, and they’ll still be injustice, and there’ll still be poor people…But he rose to be here on earth: ‘He was dead and he goes to Galilee before you.’…”

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Exposed and Naked: Clothed in Righteousness

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

It failed. The grand divine experiment made tangible in Jesus of Nazareth failed. They took him. They tried him. And, they killed him. The promised coming of the kingdom stalled out and stopped. Everything they had witnessed and seen, everything they had experienced and touched, everything they had declared and heard was all now for naught. A big waste of time. A cosmic joke of grand proportions. Their tears give way to fear which then develops into anger. The oppression of their suffering I this moment was sealed by doubt, consuming them like innocent bystanders standing too close to a shore line when a tsunami hits. Where there had been light, there was now darkness. Where there had been liberation, there was now captivity. Where there had been love, there was now numbness. Where there had been life, there was now only death.

The Sabbath demanded a great deal of silence in body and mind. The people who followed Jesus—believed him to be the Messiah—were eager to enter the kingdom of God with Jesus as their great leader; these were now the ones who had to sit with their fear, anger, grief, and, for some who ditched Jesus in his final moments hanging and dying on the cross, they had to sit with their guilt. Not only did this divine experiment fail but they failed, too. And the time marking the sundown of Friday to the sundawn on Sunday morning was excruciating, burdened with great existential dread; this silence wasn’t like normal silences. It fell upon them like judgment from God; were they exiled…again? A silence so oppressive and a darkness so heavy, they might as well have been sealed in the tomb with Jesus to wait for decay and stench to arrive signaling death’s victory.

It all failed. They failed. Jesus failed. God failed.

On this night, all those years ago, the disciples died with Christ. What they didn’t know was that the story wasn’t as over …

1 Peter 4:1-8

Peter opens the fourth chapter of his epistle emphasizing Christ’s suffering and the correlation the believer has to that suffering. Peter writes,

Therefore, since Christ suffered in the flesh, you, you also equip [yourselves] with the same thinking—because the one who suffers in the flesh has hindered sin—for the purpose of living no longer to human desires but by the will of God for the time remaining in the flesh (vv.1-2).

For Peter the suffering of Christ—a major theme in the letter[ii]—is emblematic and representative for the believer[iii] who lives in the world. It is this one who is consistently subjected to the blustering mythologies and bombastic actions of the kingdom of humanity. Thus, it is this one who must put on the mind of Christ as they suffer, taking courage that they suffer because they are hindering sin,[iv] putting an end to old associations with indifference, captivity, and death.[v] Christ’s divine glory was made tangible in and through his suffering on the cross; it is through this obscured expression of divine glory that divine glory encounters the believers in and through their own suffering in the world[vi] as they dare to live differently[vii] (hindering sin) from their coworkers, neighbors, friends, and, even, family.

Thusly, Peter continues,

For sufficient time has passed having participated in the determination of the Gentiles, having followed in licentiousness, lusts, drunkenness, rioting, carousal, and lawless idolatry, by which they have been surprised by your not joining in the same wasteful excess, so they slander[viii] (vv.3-4).

Peter exhorts the believers that their suffering in the world is the fruit of their hindering sin. For Peter, sin is temporal and not merely spiritual—act rather than power—thus, to hinder sin is not to become sinless but to withdraw from participating in the actions of the kingdom of humanity that are antagonistic to the reign of God inaugurated through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The Christian is to imitate Christ[ix] in the world; the Christian is to be a representative of Christ thereby pitting themselves against the kingdom of humanity and its actions thus leading to hindering sin in their own lives,[x] concurrently condemning those who slander them.[xi] For Peter, the believer once lived like everyone else in their society, but that way is now forever blocked.[xii] It will be up to the believer to serve either that which is easiest (going along with the kingdom of humanity thus sidestepping suffering thus negating Christ) or which is hardest: forsaking the kingdom of humanity, preferring to follow Christ, enduring temporal suffering, and seeking the way and will of the reign of God.[xiii] With either choice, they will be noticed and judged[xiv] accordingly either by their neighbor or by God and thus they will suffer now or later.[xv]

This is why Peter speaks of judgment.

They, they will have to give up word to the one who readily holds to judge the living and the dead. For this reason, the good-news is proclaimed even to the dead so that they might be judged according to human flesh but they might live by the Spirit as God does (vv.5-6).

Peter offers a word of encouragement and hope in these verses. The judgment that the believers will have to endure due to the slander of their neighbors still held captive by the allure of the kingdom of humanity pales in comparison to the judgment they will have when they find themselves face to face with God;[xvi],[xvii] for everyone–even the dead—is on a collision course with Abba God.[xviii] The believers can endure temporal suffering because the divine glory is theirs by their faith in Christ—partially now and in full when Christ comes again to judge the living and the dead.[xix] Divine glory is also theirs by way of their zealousness to imitate and represent Christ in the world to the glory of God; for as God is glorified does God give glory.

Therefore, Peter exhorts the believers to live well and to pray and to love one another,

Now the end of all things has come near. Therefore, be of sound mind and be soberminded toward prayers. Above all things, have earnest love toward each other, because love covers a great number of sins (vv.7-8).

The believers are to live in a way emphasizing their faith in Christ and their loving orientation toward each other while resisting relapsing into old habits and forsaking doing good in the world. Prayer becomes crucial here; prayer informs and is informed by love. As one bends one’s knee (literally or metaphorically) to God in prayer (a posture of humility and dependence) one is, therein, formed by God and God’s will[xx]—thus Peter’s argument comes full circle. To pray to God in the name of Christ is to identify with Christ and, therefore, to be molded in such a way as to identify with those with whom Christ identifies. This identification is none other than divine love for the beloved. Prayer gives us access to this divine love[xxi] so we can earnestly[xxii] share it with one another[xxiii] and, more importantly, share it with the world. In this way, believers participate in God’s mission[xxiv] of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation for the world.

Conclusion

For the disciples, the deadly silence of Saturday was palpable. For (about) 36 hours, waiting for the Sabbath to pass, they died; each one of them died with Christ—in hopelessness, helplessness, lifelessness, groundlessness, because of human ruthlessness. They despaired of themselves; they released all that they thought was and came to the absolute ends of themselves. And here, in their ignorance to divine movements, amid their darkest doubt, their deepest despair, surrounded by a void of sound and word, God was gearing up to usher them into a brand-new conception of what it means to live in Christ, to live in love, to live liberated from all that was. As the host of heaven held its breath and as the disciples cried, God was on the move raising the greatest gift for the cosmos: the fulfilment of God’s glorious promise, Jesus the Christ raised holding death itself captive to death, transforming suffering into glory—now and in the future, for all those who believe and follow him.

Tonight, we move from death to life. This service dives in deep to the silence of Saturday, the despair of a missing messiah, the stripping away of hope. At the beginning, we are stuck in our sin, set on a path toward that frightful day of judgment with no Christ to mediate, stealing from us any sense of peace—for how can anyone really have peace if they are always scrambling away from and fighting against judgment and death and their fruits? But in the blink of an eye, God moved, the heavenly host exhaled, and we find ourselves shrouded in the mystery of Christ being raised from the dead to be for us the source, sustenance, and sustainment of divine life, love, and liberation for all people, the entire cosmos, forever and always. We find ourselves moved from slavishly following the ways of the kingdom of humanity and (once again) in love with the reign of God and God’s will.

Tonight, we need to be moved from such enslavement into liberation so we can live and be different in a world that is collapsing into itself, being consumed by the hurt pride and immature tantrums of people who are out of control[xxv] and the epitome of hopeless,[xxvi] helpless,[xxvii] lifeless,[xxviii] groundless,[xxix] and ruthless.[xxx] Tonight, we must find ourselves naked and exposed in our complicity and captivity to the very same and then compelled to let go. We must let go of those ways because God has come in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit to clothe us with divine grace, mercy, kindness, joy, and the righteousness of God. And these are the fruits we bring into a world devastated and destroyed by death and destruction. And even as scary as our world is right now, tonight, through the suffering of Christ, our terror is quelled, our anger is released, our grief is met with divine comfort, our anxiety gives way to peace that surpasses all understanding, and our detestable state is exchanged for cherished. Tonight, As Jesus is raised to life out of death, so, too, are we raised out of death into new life, new hope, new help, on to a new ground, with new confidence not in ourselves or debased global leadership but in God, in love, in life, and in liberation. Today we are new creatures with a new life and a new way to walk in the world for the wellbeing of our neighbors and to the glory of God.

Hallelujah! Christ is Risen!

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Peter H. Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, TNICTNT, ed. F.F. Bruce (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 147.

[iii] Davids, Peter, 147. “He encourages the Christians of Northwest Asia Minor to follow the example of Christ.”

[iv] I. Howard Marshall, “1 Peter,” The IVP New Testament Commentary Series, eds. Grant R. Osborne, D. Stuart Briscoe, and Haddon Robinson, (Downers Grove: IVP Press, 1991), 133. “His point is essentially that a person who suffers shows that he has given up those things against which his suffering is a protest. In other words, by suffering Christ showed his opposition to sinful living. Therefore, persecuted Christians must follow his example and say a firm no to their temptations.”

[v] Davids, Peter, 148. “What the Christian readers here put on is an ‘insight’ or a ‘point of view.’…That point of view is explained immediately: ‘the one suffering in the flesh has finished with sin….’”

[vi] Davids, Peter, 149. “While it is obvious that this is a difficult phrase, it seems most likely that (2) and (4) in the list above make the best sense of this clause, and that they are related in that (2) expresses the main point based on the underlying assumption of (4).” And the substance of (2) and (4): “…(2) when a person suffers, he breaks the power of sin (which is rooted in his flesh) over his life or atones for the sin in his life;…(4) when Christ suffered, he finished with sin (i.e., the phrase does not refer to the Christian at all)…”

[vii] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 134. “…all Christians were controlled by sinful desires in the past, but must no longer be so controlled for the future.”

[viii] Davids, Peter, 152. “Their reaction to this nonconformity is to slander the Christians.”

[ix] Davids, Peter, 150.

[x] Davids, Peter, 149. “First, sin in 1 Peter always indicates concrete acts of sin, not the power of sin over people…the ceasing of concrete acts that is intended. Second, the desire is to draw out a principle from Christ: he suffered for sin once in the past…with the result that he will ever have to deal with sin again. Third…the battle has an ending point. Finally, the point is that once the Christian grasps this insight he will realize from the example of Christ in 3:18-22 that he must live for God now (which means a suffering in the flesh and thus a battling of sin), for that will lead to a parallel victory (a state of having ceased form sin).”

[xi] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 136. “If Christians take a firm and consistent stand against this way of life, then by implication they condemn their former associates.”

[xii] Davids, Peter, 150. “On the other hand, since the flesh is weak and fallen, it is the mode of existence in which the evil impulse in human beings operates. Believers thus have a choice: (1) they can live their remining time ‘for human desires,’ or (2) they can live it ‘for the will of God.’”

[xiii] Davids, Peter, 150. “Thus there is a clear choice between taking the path of least resistance to their natural desires and their committing themselves to follow God’s will even if it entails suffering.”

[xiv] Davids, Peter, 152. “All of this rejection was certainly painful, especially when it came in the form of rumors they could not correct and ostracism from former friends and colleagues.”

[xv] Davids, Peter, 151. “These Christians, on the other hand, had been part of the culture, so their nonparticipation was a change in behavior and thus quite noticeable.”

[xvi] Davids, Peter, 152. “While the Christians may feel abandoned by God and unable to defend themselves, it is their accusers, not they, who have a problem, for the detractors will have to answer to God.”

[xvii] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 138. “Because there will be a final judgment, what the world thinks of Christians does not matter. What matters is the twofold fact that the pagans will have to answer to God for their refusal to obey him and that those who heard the believed the gospels will be vindicated by God and enjoy eternal life.”

[xviii] Davids, Peter, 153. “Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that the concern of the phrase is not who will judge, but that even the dead cannot escape the final judgment…”

[xix] Davids, Peter, 155. “The point of the passage, then, is that the judgment is also the time of the vindication of Christians. They, like Christ, may have been judged as guilty by human beings according to their standards, either in that they died like other human beings, or through their being put to death …”

[xx] Davids, Peter, 156-157. “Thus our author is calling for a mental alertness that sees life correctly in the light of the coming end. This will lead to prayer—not the prayer based on daydreams and unreality, nor the prayer based on surprised desperation, but the prayer that calls upon and submits to God in the light of reality seen from God’s perspective and thus obtains power and guidance in the situation, however evil the time may be…for proper prayer is not an ‘opiate’ or escape, but rather a function of clear vision and a seeking of even clearer vision from God.”

[xxi] Davids, Peter, 157.

[xxii] Davids, Peter, 157. “Thus when applied in situations such as this it means not to slack off on love, to keep it going at full force, to be earnest about it…these Christians are to maintain their devotion to one another.”

[xxiii] Davids, Peter, 157. “The love that is so important is that for fellow-Christians. As in the whole NT…unity with and practical care for other Christians is not seen as an optional extra, but as a central part of the faith.”

[xxiv] Marshall, “1 Peter,” 134.

[xxv] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/02/18/exposed-and-naked-we-are-not-in-control/

[xxvi] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/02/22/exposed-and-naked-we-are-fragile/

[xxvii] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/03/08/exposed-and-naked-we-are-unsafe/

[xxviii] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/03/22/exposed-and-naked-we-are-hurt/

[xxix] https://laurenrelarkin.com/?p=7127

[xxx] https://laurenrelarkin.com/?p=7130

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Faith Fuels Audacity (sermon for St. Luke’s)

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

When I was first Christian, I had this (mis)understanding that faith would be this thing that added flavor to my regular day in and day out, that I’d be even more fine with life (whatever it was before I had faith). Fatih returned me to my life and just made me more easy going about it all. It was embedded in the evangelical culture that surrounded me, texts, discussions with peers over coffee, and littered throughout the youth material I was exposed to while helping to lead youth group. Faith wasn’t about changing anything around me, it was about changing my attitude and posture towards the things around me. Essentially, “having faith” was synonymous with “actively choosing” to be always happy even when things turned toward not-so-happy. I had to be always happy and always clappy. To be anything short was a lack of faith. Faith had nothing to do with activity of justice in the world.

But that’s a very wrong idea of faith. It’s wrong for wo reasons: 1. faith is dynamic and not static; and 2. Faith has nothing to do with choice but with trust that seems to be born from the void. In no way, shape, or form does faith return you to the status quo in which it encountered you. Faith isn’t an affirmation of your current experiences. To have faith means to encounter God and to encounter God necessarily means to be moved from something old and dead into something new and alive. And this faith isn’t something we do but something that is done to us; thus, when we encounter God and hear our names called by this God in God’s incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, faith comes to us from the outside and finds home in our hearts and minds by the power of the Holy Spirit, much like mercy, grace, and forgiveness do.

This is the point of Lent (or one of the points of Lent). Lent is a moment in liturgical time that asks us to come to the end of ourselves and find ourselves flung upon God and God’s mercy and grace. Lent, week by week, pries one finger at a time off the rope we are clinging to justify ourselves and make ourselves important in our own eyes (and the eyes of others) until the couple of fingers that are left cannot hold our weight, and we are forced to let go and fall into the void we are terrified to fall into. But in that darkness lives not a leviathan eager to consume us, but God ready to catch us and consecrate us into a new life on new ground participating in the mission of God by faith in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Genesis 12:1-4a

“The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’”

Chapter 12 in Genesis follows a colorful series of events: A loving God’s creation of everything from nothing, from the biggest to the smallest and everything in between (Gen 1), the establishment that community—with all of its similarities and diversities—is the best representation of God’s being in the world (Gen 2), fierce cherubim and seraphim blocking off all access and reentrance to the Garden of Eden after the rather fateful “applegate” and subsequent curses (Gen 3), the first murder (Gen 4), various human civilizations being established (Gen 5), the appearance of the Nehphilim (the byproduct of the Sons of God knowing the Daughters of Humanity) (Gen 6:1-6), a massive and destructive flood (Gen 6:7-8:22), a rainbow of divine promise (Gen 9), and the Tower of Babel (Gen 11). It’s here, at this point in the story, where God (once again) begins anew, moving from a general approach to a specific approach: God will call one person, not for any other reason than God’s love for the whole world.[ii] Promise eclipses condemnation; salvation triumphs over judgment.[iii]

God’s promises and blessing to Abram suggests a reversal of the curses uttered just chapters earlier.[iv] These blessings and promises highlight that Abram has done nothing to receive them; they come as a “bolt from the blue.”[v] The idea that God cannot be with God’s beloved as a result of the fall back in Genesis 3 is rendered myth. God calls Abram and blesses him; where Adam, Eve, and the serpent leave behind paradise, Abram is invited into it: paradise is union with God. Herein is the foundation for the claim that the curses are being reversed: by God’s love, Abram will be a great nation (many children, one of whom will be the Messiah, the promised child of Genesis 3) and this nation will be a blessing to the rest of the world.[vi],[vii]

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.

In this moment of hearing the divine summons, Abram goes from a childless old man to the parent of many; here Abram becomes a new person, a new being by the Word of God summoning him to God’s self and thus into new life.[viii] And not a new self for his own sake. In hearing of the divine summons, Abram is ushered into a new life for others.[ix] This other-orientated characteristic of his new life will become part of his new identity in God and with God as he becomes a conduit for God to bless other nations.[x] And in our context, the overflow of blessing and promise has already started: as Abram responds to God and finds his new life in God, Lot goes with him into this new thing.[xi]

Abram’s encounter with God in the event of faith sent him on the way; it moved him from his old life defined by his old patterns and actions into a new life defined by new patterns and actions. God’s promise and good word called him out of and moved him from the ways of the kingdom of humanity into new life defined by the reign of God.[xii] Through no work of his own or deservedness, Abram is called out of death into life, [xiii] and receives all righteousness by faith[xiv] alone (sola fides).[xv] The bareness that once defined Abram’s (and Sarai’s) life—a bareness that symbolized not only a lack of promise[xvi] but a lack of lively living and the absence of hope—is now replaced with faith clinging to the promise of God resulting in the active fruit born of faith trusting in God’s action toward Abram and Sarai.[xvii] And it is this faith on the move with the God who seeks after the beloved that will provoke God’s glory to be hallowed by the neighbor who is so loved[xviii] by those who, like Abram and Sarai, live and act by faith and participate in God’s mission of justice[xix] and the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.[xx]

Conclusion

Faith is not a return to or affirmation of what was; it can’t be because it is born of God and not of humanity. (Humanity prefers the known and old; God is always on the move, doing something new.) When we acquire faith, we acquire all of God and that means (definitively) we acquire something new, something different, something (even at times) strange from what we have known. Faith is not our own work that brings us up into the light where everything becomes clear and discernable. Faith is the work of God summoning us down into the dark, into the void, into the depths of trust. Faith renders us fools and stumbling blocks to those who dominate by the wisdom and reason of the kingdom of humanity. Faith beckons us (always) into something new…not a new God but a new encounter with God that moves us and provokes us to new life that is bedazzled by the new fruit of the reign of God. Faith moved Abram into being a blessing to the nations (and not only for his own). Thus, while the one who receives faith is passive in the reception, they do not stay passive; they become active because faith does not know stillness and idleness and is eager to work itself out in loving deeds for the neighbor’s well-being (being blessed) and to the glory of God (God being blessed by the neighbor).

To have faith isn’t always about having confidence and certainty about events and situations in the world. Even if by faith we can be certain of God’s disposition and posture toward us, we cannot be certain that things of the world will go our way or the way we want. (And often they won’t.) What faith does do, though, is give us the daring energy and praxis in the world to call forth and pull into the kingdom of humanity the reign of God—whenever and wherever it is needed and demanded. It fuels the audacity of our participation in the mission of God which is the bringing forth of divine justice in the world. Faith is the bedrock and foundation of our active pursuit of love where there is indifference, of liberation where there is captivity, and life where there is death.

(Portions of the middle were edited versions from this sermon: https://laurenrelarkin.com/2023/03/05/nothing-seems-to-satisfy-craving-identity/)

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Levenson, “Genesis” The Jewish Study Bible: Featuring the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation. Eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 30.    “The universalism that marked Gen. chs 1-11 having now failed, the Lord begins anew, singling out one Mesopotamian—in no way distinguished from his peers as yet—and promising to make of him a great nation, not numbered in the seventy nations of ch. 10.”

[iii] Miguel A. De La Torre, Genesis, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2011), 142. “This biblical passage….bridges the story of human rebellion with the story of human promise, the story of God’s judgment with the story of God’s salvation.”

[iv] Levenson, “Genesis” The Jewish Study Bible, 30. “What the Lord promises Abram (his name is changed to ‘Abraham’ only in ch 17)—land, numerous offspring, and blessing—constitutes to an extent a reversal of some of the curses on Adam and Eve—exile, pain in childbirth, and uncooperative soil…”

[v] Levenson, “Genesis” The Jewish Study Bible, 30. “The twin themes of land and progeny inform the rest of the Torah. In Gen. ch 12, these extraordinary promises come like a bolt from the blue, an act of God’s grace alone; no indication has been given as to why or even whether Abram merits them.”

[vi] LW 2 (Luther’s Works Vol 2 “Lectures on Genesis Chapters 6-14” Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1960.) 246. “…Moses reminds his people that they were chosen by the Lord, not because they had deserved this but because the Lord had loved them and was keeping the oath that had been given to their fathers? In this passage we see that the beginnings are in agreement with the end. For what is Abraham except a man who nears God when He calls him, that is, a merely passive person and merely the material on which divine mercy acts?”

[vii] De la Torre, Genesis, 145-146. “Because Abram obeys, God promises to make him (not Sarai) a great nation, blessing him and making his name so famous that future generations will use it as a blessing. Unlike those who solely rely on their own abilities, set out to make a name for themselves (Babel), and fail (1:4), Abram discovers that obedience to God is what makes on famous.”

[viii] LW 2 247. “Thus, as I said above, Abraham is merely the material that the Divine Majesty seizes through the Word and forms into a new human being and into a patriarch, And so this rule is universally true, that of himself man is nothing, is capable of nothing, and has nothing except sin, death, and damnation; but through His mercy Almighty God brings it about that he is something and is freed from sin, death…”

[ix] De La Torre, Genesis, 142. “Even though God chooses one people, the promise made to God’s chosen exhibits caring for all of humanity, for they too can partake in the blessing. The God of Abram is not limited to this one family, this one clan, this one tribe. Abram’s God is the God through which all nations can find a blessing because Abram’s God is the God of all nations.”

[x] LW 2 258-259. “Here is presented the amazing promise that this people will not only be increased among itself and be blessed materially and spiritually, but that the blessing will also overflow to the neighboring nations and peoples. This happened to the Pharaoh in Egypt.”

[xi] LW 2 275. “Behold God’s marvelous counsel! The promise pertained to Abraham only, not to Lot. Nevertheless, God attaches Lot, like a proselyte, to Abraham as his companion and moves his heart so that he wants to go into exile with his uncle rather than remain in his native country among the idolaters. This is because the promise given to Abraham be blessed with his descendants, it him others would become partakers of the blessing, even though the promise did not properly pertain to them.”

[xii] De la Torre, Genesis, 145. “The call of Abram becomes the call of all who choose to follow God. All who are to follow the Divine must leave their old life behind and follow toward a new creation.”

[xiii] De la Torre, Genesis, 145. “Abram’s hand was on the plow, and he did not look back. He obeyed and left, breaking with tradition and the past. There were no preconditions before God called or chose Abram. Unlike Noah, we are not told that God chose Abram because he was righteous or just. Indeed, as Abram’s life unfolds, we discover a very flawed man. Nevertheless, God chose him.”

[xiv] LW 2:267. “Therefore faith is an active, difficult, and powerful thing. If we want to consider what it really is, it is something that is done to us rather than something that we do; for it changes the heart and mind. And while reason is wont to concern itself with the things that are present, faith apprehends the things that are not present and, contrary to reason, regards them as being present.”

[xv] De la Torre, Genesis, 145. “Abram did not need to first change his life or become more acceptable to God before being chosen. All he did to make himself worthy of God was obey. Abram’s obedience becomes the foundation of faith.”

[xvi] De la Torre, Genesis, 143. Ref. Walter Brueggemann “…[Sarai’s] barrenness symbolizes a people without promise.”

[xvii] De la Torre, Genesis, 143-144. “As Bruegemann states, barrenness is the way of human history, an effective metaphor for hopelessness; but in the arena of barrenness, God’s life-giving action takes place.”

[xviii] De la Torre, Genesis, 146. “God’s purpose for the world will rely on this one man and his descendants, a difficult task since he and Sarai are advanced in years and she is barren. Any hope of fulfilling the promise will only be attributed to a miracle from God.”

[xix] De la Torre, Genesis, 147. “If God is a God of justice, then all who are committed to justice are a blessing to the one who God chooses to exemplify justice, even if at times they fall short. Only when we practice justice can we call Abram our spiritual father and be grafted onto the vine.”

[xx] De la Torre, Genesis, 146-147. “We bless Abram, and God, by doing what God requires of us. And what does God requires or us? He requires us to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God (Mic. 6:8). Justice cannot take place on an individual basis. Community is needed if justice is to occur, if loving mercy is to happen. Hence the call of God for Abram to be an example of God’s justice requires the establishment of a people, of a nation; thus Abram must have descendants.”

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Not for Law But for Love

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[1]

Introduction

What, in our lives, brings God glory? I’ll say two things up front: 1. It’s not what you think; and, 2. It’s harder than you think.

Luke 13:10-17

Luke tells us that Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath (v10). Luke gives us a location that Jesus hasn’t been in a while—not since chapter 4, when he was teaching on the Sabbath about bringing “good news to the poor” and “release the captives.”[2] Therefore, given this new scene and its corresponding component parts, Luke is providing his audience a reminder about how Jesus spoke of and understood his mission from God: liberation of the people from oppression. (This is our backdrop.) Also, since he’s in the synagogue on the Sabbath, we can safely assume that another conflict will emerge between Jesus and the religious authorities[3] as human tradition and power is confronted by divine love and mercy. [4]

Luke then tells us, And, behold!, [there was] a woman having a spirit of frailty for 18 years—she was bent double and not able to lift toward the uttermost (v11). Another character is introduced: a woman who was bent over so severely she could not stand up straight for 18 years. She is “burdened” by a spirit that is causing her to suffer, she is doubled-over under the weight of its presence, she is oppressed by evil and the demonic and this evil spirit has refused her the vitality and dignity of divinely created human life.[5] She was minding her own business, going about her task, and was not seeking either attention or healing. However, Jesus saw her[6]—God of very God saw her and cared about her. Then, Now, after perceiving her, [he] called and said to her, “Woman, you have been released from your malady,” and he placed his hands on her, and instantly she was restored/straightened again and she as giving glory to/glorifying God (vv12-13). The healing Jesus brings to this humble and burdened woman is one of “release” and restoration: she is not only released from her malady of being doubled-over but also from the spirit causing the burden; she is also returned to community (Jesus calls her to him in the midst of the people).[7] In a word, Jesus rebukes the evil spirit by declaring she is no longer oppressed and follows it up with laying his hands on her. The word of God spoke, the hand of God touched, and she was liberated, loosed from/set free from her captivity (ἀπολύω). Jesus’s word and touch bring God glory because God’s praise is found on the lips of the one liberated.

But Jesus isn’t the only one who perceives and calls. Luke tells us that the ruler of the synagogue—being indignant because Jesus healed on the Sabbath—answered and was saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which to toil; therefore on these days come and be healed and not [on] the day of the Sabbath” (v14). The religious leader isn’t wrong, it is his job to faithfully keep and study the law[8] and he’s referring to scripture here (but not quoting it (Dt. 5:13)).[9] The Sabbath was a divinely instituted law of God, what “ought to be done” was rest and not work. Here Jesus finds himself confronted by the evil Spirit in the woman, and the evil spirit[10] deeply embedded in the atmosphere around him personified by the ruler of the synagogue: law has privilege over the people.[11] This ruler of the synagogue—privileging the law over the person thus participating in the evil embedded in the atmosphere[12] —would’ve added “another umpteen centuries” to this woman’s burden rather than “break” the law to release her. Jesus, however—privileging the person over the law and thus confronting the evil embedded in the atmosphere[13]—liberated and released her even on the Sabbath. Which action caused God to be praised?[14]

Not only is Jesus’s ministry being characterized as one of “release,”[15] the very laws of God, God’s word, God’s son, God’s mission in the world is also being so characterized by “release.”[16] Luke tells us that Jesus, the lord, answered and said [to the ruler of the synagogue and the crowd], “Hypocrite! Do not everyone of you releases their cow or donkey from the manger and after leading it away gives it water? But this woman—being a daughter of Abraham—Satan bound her ten and eight years, was it not necessary [for her] to be loosed from this imprisonment on the day of the Sabbath? (vv15-16). Luke emphasizes Jesus’s authority to challenge the authority of the ruler of the synagogue. Even though the ruler of the synagogue tried to challenge Jesus and reassert his authority,[17] Jesus returns the favor. He also quotes scripture, but highlights the hypocrisy in that, according to the text, not even animals are supposed to work, thus Dt. 5:14 goes ignored.[18] Here Jesus becomes the one who has the authority to both interpret the law and scripture and God’s will and purposes in the world and opts to break the law to liberate a daughter of Abraham.[19] Here the ruler and the crowd are exposed as the ones who do not know God’s will and who do not understand the law and it’s purpose.[20] Here Jesus responds to the ruler’s “ought to be done” with his own “ought to be done”: healing, release, restoration, liberation for all humanity,[21] especially those who are a [children] of Abraham. She not only has some place in the children of Israel, but has a significant place marked by being one of the people of God who has dignity and deserves to receive God’s mercy and liberation[22] and is given a voice to glorify God which is the characteristic of the people of God.[23]

Luke closes with telling us that not only did the woman praise God, but so did the people who witnessed the deed and the subsequent exchange.[24] Luke writes, and all the crowd was rejoicing because of all the glorious things that were happening through him (v17b).

Conclusion

So, again, I’ll ask the question: What, in our lives, brings God glory?

I mentioned earlier that it’s not what you think. By this I mean that it’s not by adhering to some austere and severe way of life, it’s not embedded in some form of self-harm/mutilation (either spiritually or materially), it’s not at the end of a pilgrimage or fast or bible-study/reading, it’s not the pot of gold at the end of being strong and powerful, it’s not in our success no matter how much we give God the credit, it’s not about perfect worship and excellent doctrine, and it’s not even by clinging to the law (either human or divine) and upholding it without fail. Why? Because none of those deeds puts God and our neighbor first, and it, frankly, devalues human life to the point of being unimportant and down-right disposable, only any good by ho it serves some law. In any of these actions, as good and holy as any of them sound, there is no room for God and for our neighbor.

I also mentioned, earlier, that it’s harder than you think. By this I mean that even though it’s not about the deeds mentioned above it doesn’t mean that we bring God glory by just going along with the crowd and adhering to the kingdom of humanity and its rules and structures without question. It’s also not as easy as just choosing to be nice and people pleasing. It’s hard because we must find our identity not only in Christ but also find ourselves empowered by the Holy Spirit to be as Christ in the world and this means, in many ways, participating in the mission of God as Jesus did. Thus, it’s hard because we must be curious; we must be willing to be the fodder for challenge; we must find our voice to ask questions—specifically against the powers that control the narratives and institutions of the kingdom of humanity; we must locate the gumption to call out lies and falsehoods knowing that it might/will cause our social, political, ecclesiastical, occupational, and (even) physical demise. We must allow our faith and love of God and others to determine our posture in the world, and we must do so daily and without foreknowledge. Why is it harder than you think? Because to bring God glory caused Jesus to lose his life.

So, what does bring God glory? Jesus forever sets the answer to the question for us: by making sure people are liberated from oppression (both spiritually and materially). This means, quite frankly, that we participate in the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation, being willing to break the law as necessary to make sure our neighbors—burdened by the evil of the age that weighs them down and prevents them from having fully life—are released from their captivity within the kingdom of humanity. As Christians who have been liberated by Jesus to love God, let us also love our neighbor in and through the love that God has loved us in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, and let us bring life where there is death, and sweet divine release and liberation where there is captivity. Love releases and sets free; therefore, beloved, let us love as we have been so loved by God through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

[1] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[2] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 520-521. “There, when teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath, Jesus proclaimed ‘good news to the poor,’ ‘the good news of the kingdom of God’…Recalling that well-established script, we may assume that Luke has chosen at this fresh point of departure in the narrative to remind us of a the central concerns of Jesus’ ministry and, thus, to present Jesus engaged in the characteristic activity by means of which he fulfills  his divine mission.”

[3] Justo L. Gonzalez, Luke, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 173. “This well-known passage is a further sign of the growing controversy between Jesus and the religious Leaders of his nation.”

[4] Gonzalez, Luke, 173. “For in this text we have not just a miracle of healing, but the convergence of ancient and seemingly invincible powers, all coming to meet that Sabbath day in that synagogue.”

[5] Gonzalez, Luke, 173-174. “The point is that the woman cannot stand up straight, and that is demonic…With that woman there comes into the synagogue what we religious folk often try to forget: the reality of the power of evil, the reality of human suffering.”

[6] Green, Luke, 522.

[7] Green, Luke, 522-523. “When Jesus sees her, he does not go to her but calls her to him, thus inviting her to join him in front of those gathered and so to join him at the focal point of this scene. Locating this woman of such low status thus is not unrelated to the healing moment, but is directly relevant as a symbolization of her restoration within her community.”

[8] Green, Luke, 523. “The role of the synagogue ruler was to maintain the reading and faithful teaching of the law…”

[9] Green, Luke, 523. “He does not even cite the relevant texts, but grounds his view in what ‘ought to be done’—that is, in the divine will.” The woman can be healed tomorrow.

[10] Gonzalez, Luke, 174. “The confrontation points to the always lurking possibility that very good religious principles may be turned into allies of the powers of evil.”

[11] Gonzalez, Luke, 174. “On the one hand, in that woman’s suffering Satan himself confronts him. On the other, in the entire atmosphere around him, in the very law of Israel, in the leader of the synagogue, the weight of tradition seems to say that there is nothing to be done.”

[12] Gonzalez, Luke, 174. “The leader of the synagogue was defending religious principles derived from the very law of God. Yet in that very defense he was siding with the powers of evil that held the woman bent.”

[13] Green, Luke, 521. “From this ethnomedical perspective, the, this woman’s illness has a physiological expression but is rooted in a cosmological disorder. Because Luke has presented Jesus as the divine agent of salvation in whose ministry the kingdom of God is made present and in whose ministry the domain of Satan is rolled back, Luke’s depiction of this woman’s illness prepares us for a redemptive encounter of startling proportions.”

[14] Gonzalez, Luke, 174. “Jesus faces the bent-over woman, oppressed by the weight of Satan himself. To her oppression of eighteen years the religious leaders would add another of umpteen centuries: It is the Sabbath! It is a day for religious matters! Jesus saw the woman, and he called her, and he spoke to her, and he laid his hands on her, and immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.”

[15] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 518.

[16] Green, Luke, 519. “…Jesus’ encounter with this woman and his ensuing interpretation of her liberation as a necessary manifestation of the divine will, an outworking of the presence of the kingdom, on this day, the Sabbath. That is, the intrusion of the indignant synagogue ruler into Jesus’ encounter with the women bent over (v 14) provides Jesus the opportunity to interpret that healing as a fulfillment of God’s purpose ,and, thus, of Jesus’ mission (vv 15-21).”

[17] Green, Luke, 523. Ruler of the Synagogue addresses the people and not Jesus, “In this way he publicly challenges Jesus’ authority as a teacher and reasserts himself as the authorized interpreter of Scripture.”

[18] Green, Luke, 524. Ruler of Synagogue’s allusion to Deut 5:13 causes Jesus to return to that text “in order to remind this debate partner that the prohibition to work extends not only to human beings but also to oxen and donkeys (Deut 5:14).”

[19] Green, Luke, 520. “…Luke introduces Jesus as ‘Lord,’ then presents him as one with authority to interpret God’s salvific purpose. Directly or indirectly, both synagogue ruler and Jesus appeal to the Scriptures, but Jesus is represented as the divinely sanctioned hermeneut.”

[20] Green, Luke, 524. Setting up a series of parallels with ref. to Deut 5:14, “From this exegesis of the Deuteronomic law and contemporary practices based on it, Jesus is able to expose the ruler of the synagogue and those who think as he does as ‘hypocrites’—that is, as persons who do not understand God’s purpose, who therefore are unable to discern accurately the meaning of the scriptures, and therefore, whose piety is a sham.”

[21] Green, Luke, 524. “On a deeper sense, though, Jesus seems content to engage the argument just as the synagogue ruler had left it, with reference to the devein will. What ‘ought’ to take place, he insists, is this: This woman out to be set free from satanic bondage on the Sabbath.”

[22] Green, Luke, 525. “…Jesus’ God’s covenantal promise and the extension of God’s covenantal mercy to Abraham….She is ‘a daughter of Abraham,’ and appellation that might signal heroic faithfulness in some other literature, but with a profoundly different significance in the Lukan narrative. She is thus presented as one of those persons denoted by others has having no place among the people of God, normally excluded from social intercourse and certainly not highly regarded for their fidelity, and yet raised up by God as children of Abraham in the sene of becoming the recipients of the mercy reserved for Abraham by God.”

[23] Green, Luke, 525-526. “She and other children of Abraham in the Lukan narrative evidence how God’s promise to Abraham is fulfilled through the activity of Jesus and how the recipients of liberation through Jesus’ ministry are thus confirmed as Abrahm’s children.”

[24] Green, Luke, 526. “He had attempted to shame Jesus but, in the end, he and those with him who oppose Jesus are shamed as the crowd sides with Jesus This also means that they side with the narrator, attributing to Jesus the status of authoritative teacher and recognizing in the ‘wonderful things he was doing’ the gracious hand of God…”

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“The Life Giving Breath of the Church”

Psalm 104:34-35, 37  I will sing to Abba God as long as I live; I will praise my God while I have my being. May these words of mine please Abba God; I will rejoice in Abba God. Bless Abba God, O my soul. Hallelujah!

Introduction

Unintentionally and unwittingly our Christian talk (and God-talk) often sounds as if we’ve forgotten the role of the Spirit in our praxis and doxology (practice and worship). I’m sure many of us, including me, keep the Spirit tucked away back in the recesses of our mind, and we don’t feel like we’re forgetting anything or anyone. I mean, come on, we, Episcopalians, are good Trinitarian, Creedal Christians; we believe in all three persons of the God head. But I get the impression from others—including from myself—that we don’t often take the Holy Spirit—the divine Spirit of God, God in God’s self—seriously. Any form of the pastoral don’t forget about the power of the Spirit is met with yeah, yeah, yeah, the spirit…whatever. (The last part mentioned silently as we turn to continue to do things of our own mind and power.)

Liturgically, the feast day celebrating the arrival of God’s Spirit to dwell in sinner-saints pales in comparison to the way we celebrate Christmas and Easter. Maybe it’s because Pentecost lacks a precursory penitential period like Christmas and Easter; there’s no obvious demand to sit and wait like there is in Advent or an inspiration to fast like there is in Lent. Frankly, this Sunday feels like just another Sunday; once Easter hits, all the BIG feast days are done, now it’s time to relax… Don’t worry, I’m implicated here, too. I’m aware of my own slackened posture toward everything that follows Easter Sunday’s setting sun.

For the Christian Church, the Church doesn’t exist until the Spirit comes, until today. Christmas doesn’t cause it to exist; Easter builds the foundation for it but not the structure. Pentecost establishes the Church in both its seen and unseen expressions; the Spirit is the reason why the Church will never die even if it ceases to exist as it does today. The Spirit is at the core our Christian Identity, both individually and corporately. It is the Spirit who brings all of us together in sibling like unity while celebrating our radiant and beautiful differences is certainly divine work, as Paul says,

Romans 8:14-17

For whoever is guided/carried by the Spirit of God, these ones are sons [children] of God (v.14). Paul, addressing the Jewish and Gentile Christians in Roman, declares to both parties that anyone (“whoever”) has the divine Spirit of God is by default a child (“son”) of God. It is these ones who were indebted to the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of the flesh (clean/unclean; wise/foolish; free/slave), who are now indebted to the Spirit.[1] In this way, their obligations to and association with others must take on a different vibe: one informed by and structured on the unity created by the Holy Spirit. [2] Another way to say this is, Christian Romans—both Jew and Gentile—are dependent on the Holy Spirit for their identification with Christ and their union with God by faith and this makes them more than just a group of individuals; it makes them one body.

Paul goes further, though. It is the Spirit, according to Paul, that makes those who follow The Way of Christ, family. Thus, why Paul then says, For you did not receive a spirit of captivity again into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption by which we cry out, “Papa, Father!” (v. 15). The divine Spirit, who is the source of their identity as “Christ followers” and of their union with God, is the one who ensures that whoever is carried by the spirit, whoever is dependent on the Spirit can call God “Papa!” (By the Spirit, God becomes “Papa!” and is the one you run to in distress rather than flee because of fear.[3]) The theme of adoption Paul employs here carries with it the legal connotation familiar to the Roman society: a person who is not related to you by birth is designated as one’s heir.[4] According to Paul, and this will sound offensive to us[5] as it probably did to the Jewish Children of Israel, no one is a child of God by birth (creation) but only by adoption through the presence of the Holy Spirit,[6] …the same Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God (v. 16).

Does this mean that the “children of God” are only Christians, and it is these who are worthy of love, life, liberation?[7] The answer to that is “No.” Recalling v. 14, For whoever is guided/carried by the Spirit of God, these are sons/children of God, the “whoever” expands the definition, broadens the scope from those who look, act, are a certain way to whoever is so imbued with God’s Spirit and whoever thusly acts like children of God (cf. Romans 2).[8] Said in another way, those who love/anyone who loves those who and that which God loves are the children of God because to love as God loves is the result of the presence of God who is love.[9] Concurrently, Paul is talking to a community threatening division over identities,[10] to this Paul says, Stop it! You are all the children of God, no group more so than the other; we are all children of God who have this same Spirit affirming us and helping us all to cray out “Papa, Father!” (Αββα ὁ πατήρ being both Aramaic and Greek father addresses[11]). Thus, their obligations are to each other—no matter previous religious affiliation and sex (Paul switches from “sons” (υἱοί) to “children” (τέκνα) or other facets of identity[12]. If this, then, following John from last week, those outside of the church will know these ones follow Christ and encounter Christ thus God through the community in unity’s witness in the world by the power of the Spirit.[13]

Our passage ends with Paul saying, Now if children then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs of Christ, if we suffer together/are affected by the same thing so that also we might be glorified (v. 17). According to Paul, those who are guided/carried by the Spirit of God, are those who become children of God, who have God as their Abba, Parent, and are those who are joint-heirs with Christ. Heirs of what? Well, not heirs of the honor and glory and power offered by the kingdom of Humanity, but of suffering. What type of suffering? Well, the suffering that Christ suffered. Those who are children of God are siblings of Christ and if siblings than they will also speak and act in the world as Christ did and this brings suffering and not human defined glory and success. Why? Because Christ didn’t identify with the strong and powerful, but with the weak and powerless and this, by faith and the power of the Holy Spirit yoking us into the family of Christ and God, means that we identity with the least of these, too, as Christ did;[14] in this way, we do not create our own glory defined by the kingdom of humanity, but receive glory from God in the reign of God.[15] How the disciples of Christ, the Church, treat the most disenfranchised and oppressed of society, speaks to their identification with Christ and whether or not the Spirit is present in and among them.

Conclusion

Every Sunday, we say this about the Spirit:

We believe in God within us, 
the Holy Spirit burning with Pentecostal fire,
life-giving breath of the Church, 
Spirit of healing and forgiveness,
source of resurrection and of eternal life.

This is no small declaration. God dwells within us in the Spirit, who inflames our hearts and bodies to participate in God’s mission of the revolution of love, life, and liberation, the Spirit is the means by which we are healed and how forgiveness (both God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others) is worked out, and it is the Spirit that is credited with our daily resurrection and the the hope we carry of our bodily resurrection into eternal life at the time of death. The Spirit is the “life giving breath of the Church”; in other words, without the Spirit there is no Church. Our first reading highlights this point: Peter and those with him receive the Spirit and can now speak in different languages thus proclaiming the good news of God that is the incarnate word of Jesus the Christ. From here, the church begins to be a thing in the world, a place carved into time and space to make room for an encounter with God in the event of faith through Jesus preached and, by the power of the Spirit, Christ heard. It is by the Spirit that people, from anywhere and everywhere, can gather and be one as Christ and Abba God are one and be made into the representatives of Christ in the world (ref. John 17). It is by the Spirit that these people so gathered can grow into the likeness of Christ, to become those who can hear the leading of God’s will on earth as it is in heaven and follow the divine footsteps toward the beloved who are fighting to survive in any generation (ref. John 16). It is by the Holy Spirit that the ones so gathered can become the mature Christians of Ephesians who find themselves flexible in receiving and responding to God’s continuous self-disclosure even when it contradicts the kingdom of humanity (ref. Ephesians 4). And it is by the power of this Spirit of Love, that those who hear and gather can consider themselves to be God’s children, thus heirs with Christ of all that is of Abba God.

[1] Sarah Heaner Lancaster, Romans, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 139. “Although he does not explicitly state the further implication of no longer being debtors to the flesh, it is clear form what he has said previously that we are debtors instead to the spirit.”

[2] Lancaster, Romans, 139. “When we leave the law of sin and death to follow the law of Spirit and life, we exchange one set of obligations for another. Our new obligations are established not by a system of patronage but by being brothers and sisters in Christ, children of God. This relationship is what determines our responsibilities to one another.”

[3] LW 25:358. “For in the spirit of fear it is not possible to cry, for we can scarcely open our mouth or mumble. But faith expands the heart, the emotions, and the voice, but fear tightens up all these things and restricts them, as our experience amply testifies. Fear does not say Abba but rather it hates and flees form the Father as from an enemy and mutters against him as a tyrant. For those people who are in the spirit of fear and not int eh sprit of adoption do not taste how sweet he Lord is…but rather He appears to them as a harsh and hard, and int heir heart they call Him a virtual tyrant, although with the mouth they call Him Father…”

[4] Lancaster, Romans, 139. “To further stress the relationship of being brothers and sisters in Christ, Paul uses the image of adoption, a legal practice in roman society of designating someone who is not one’s physical offspring to be one’s heir.”

[5] Lancaster, Romans, 140. The modern conception of “children of God” based on our being all created as God’s children is not the image Paul has. “…Paul speaks of being children of God by adoption, not by creation. Although it does capture and expand concern about our obligations toward one another, this understanding of all humans as children of God does not help to understand what Paul means in these verses.”

[6] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “The status of child of God is not given to all humans simply by virtue of being human. It belongs specifically to those who have been led into this relationship by the Spriit.”

[7] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “The idea that ‘children of God’ is a more restricted group than all humans leads to the question about who belongs in that group.”

[8] Also building here from Dorothee Sölle’s conception that anyone who identifies with the least of these and meets their real, tangible, physical need are those who represent Christ to humanity. See her Christ the Representative.

[9] LW 25:358-359. Shifting from spirit of fear to spirit of love can only happen if “we have His spirit, so that in the same spirit we love the same things which He loves and hate the things which He hates in the same way that He does. For we cannot love those things which God loves unless we have the love and will and spirt which He has. …And those people are called godlike men and sons of God because they are led by the Spirit of God.”

[10] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “Paul is still addressing the whole community (‘you’ plural and ‘we’). His intent is not to break down community in competition over who is a child of God and who is not, but rather to underscore the new community we have when we are in Christ.”

[11] Lancaster, Romans, 142. “…Paul has included both the Aramaic and Greek forms of address to God. The inclusion of both languages makes sense in a community made up of Greek and Jewish followers of Jesus, and since both words indicate the adopted status of the ones who cry out, each group needs to recognize its common inheritance with the other. Because the word ‘heir’ calls to mind Paul’s discussion of inheritance regarding God’s promise to Abraham (4:13-14) the direct address to God in both Aramaic and Greek reinforces the common spiritual ancestry of the followers of Jesus, whether they may be Jew or Gentile. Neither group has a lesser place in the community, and they need to see and treat each other equally as brothers and sisters in Christ.”

[12] Lancaster, Romans, 141. Word play in Greek between huiothesias and huioi “The Greek wordplay between “sons” and “son-making” also calls to mind that in 8:3 Paul says God sent the Son into the world to deal with sin. Through Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, we come adopted sons and therefore join heirs with Christ. The masculine language in Greek has a purpose in connecting all these ideas, but Paul drops the masculine language in 8:16-17 to speak instead of ‘children’ (tekna). By shifting to language that is not gender -specific, Paul makes clear that women as well as men are heirs with Christ, thus breaking down on of the traditional hierarchical barriers between people in Romans society and opening the way to think of how other barriers are also overcome in Christ. Adoption makes the followers of Jesus kin to one another, brothers and siters in Christ, regardless of their place in society.”

[13] Lancaster, Romans, 141. “The presence of the Spirit in the gathering for worship leads the followers of Jesus to cry out to God as a parent, confirming that they are not slaves but children of God. Their allegiance to the dominion of the Spirit presents them with a new set of obligations—not obligations of slave to master but rather the obligations of joint heirs because of their common adopted status.”

[14] LW 25:356. “‘To be led by the Spirit of God’ is to put to death our flesh, that is, the old Adam, and to do it freely, promptly, and gladly, that is to despise and renounce all that is not God, even ourselves, and thus ‘not to fear death or the friends of death, the fierce race of penalties,’ and likes ‘to give up the empty pleasures of the world its corrupt and sordid prices,’ and freely to relinquish all good things and embrace evils in their place. This is not characteristic of our nature, but is a work of the Spirit of God in us.”

[15] Lancaster, Romans, 142. “Of course, the inheritance that joint heirs with Christ receive comes through being baptized into his death. Suffering comes before glory. Just as the son took on the vulnerability of weakness, which brings social shame, the joint-heirs with Christ must give up the mindset of the flesh that would seek glory in status and power and instead follow the Son’s example of accepting the suffering that accompanies weakness in order to gain a more secure glory. The passive ‘be glorified’ indicates that glory is not ours to be own, but rather it is God’s to give.”

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Like Paul and Peter

Psalm 23:3-4 Abba God revives my soul and guides me along right pathways for their Name’s sake. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Introduction

My favorite thing about the book of Acts, is the way the narrative camera focuses on the human beings left behind to participate in God’s mission of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation without Jesus by their side. As human as the Gospels can be, they still feel—to me—just outside of my experience in the world. As far as I know, I’ve not been—literally—summoned by Jesus to come follow him and leave my—literal—net behind. I’ve not witnessed with my own eyes the healing miracles and the awesome casting out of demons. I did not run and hide with fear on Good Friday, nor feel the warmth burn in my heart as Jesus taught me on the way in his resurrected state. I didn’t witness the ascension or suddenly speak in a foreign language (no matter how much my charismatic evangelical background wants to think I have). I am just an audience member from 2025, listening to these ancient stories mixed up with a healthy amount of faith and doubt, skeptical and hungry.

So, this is why I love acts. Watching Paul get knocked off his donkey and onto his donkey through the proclamation of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit—having his misdirection redirected—brings the story home. I too have needed to be knocked down a peg or two, put in my place, reminded of my creaturely status before the Creator. I have thought myself to be so right and on point that I was completely misdirected toward what God was doing and celebrated the tendency of the kingdom of humanity to perform acts of violence and needed to be redirected. Witnessing Peter’s rapid exposure to the new movements and actions of God made known first in Christ and made real in Peter’s heart through the power of the Holy Spirit, is something I can confess to, too. I, too, have been graciously, generously, and patiently reinstructed that all are in and none are out, relearned God’s merciful divine activity that extends beyond skin, sex, and superficial boundaries, (re)experienced (manifold times) the pathos of God for the Beloved, and have stumbled about while desperately trying to walk in this new way, talk with new words, love with a new heart, think with a new mind, and see through new lenses all crafted and created by a God who so loves the cosmos that God won’t spare Gods self to save it.

I read something somewhere that said the best way to explain the book of acts is to see it as the movement and activity of the Holy Spirit rather than of the disciples. Are they central to this story building in the book of Acts? Yes, they are. But they are not the only performers on the stage. The Holy Spirit takes up their role and whisks and moves these human forms, destroying notions of autonomy and free-will, taking them hither and tither, bringing them into contact with those whom they would never ever be in contact with, reducing them through exposure, and building them up through love and liberation into new life defined by the reign of God. Last week we received the story of Saul and his “conversion”; this week, we are exposed to Peter walking in the way of Jesus, doing the initial things that will become some of the hallmarks of what it means not only to be Christian, but also Church.

Acts 9:36-43

We jump quite a bit forward in Acts 9. We move from Paul’s conversion to the beginning of Peter’s radical exposure to the law of God which is the law of love for all God’s beloved, transcending national and religious boundaries rather than creating them. Starting a bit earlier in the chapter than our lectionary suggests, we find Peter in Lydda, having been brought there by the Holy Spirit to the those who are called “living saints”.[1] By using the word “Saints” Luke highlights that the divide between the secular and the sacred is diminishing; every day regular people are indwelled with divine holiness, a holiness that will not fade away and creates a new way of being in the world as God’s vessels bringing divine life, love and liberation to others like themselves.[2] (This is very good news for regular people like you and me!) So, Peter is with these everyday saints, and he is there to heal a man who was paralyzed for 8 years. Through Peter, the Holy Spirit heals this man, and the story of his healing becomes a source for those in Lydda and the surrounding area (Sharon) to praise God and turn to Christ in faith (vv. 32-35).[3] In Lydda, Peter is doing as Jesus did: healing and liberating the oppressed and bringing glory to God.[4]

While Peter is in Lydda, over in Joppa there was a certain disciple by [the] name Tabitha, which [in Greek] is translated as Dorcas, she was full of good works, and she was doing acts of mercy. But it happened in those days she [became] sick and died; when she died, they washed her body, writes Luke, and they placed her body in an upper room (vv. 36-37). The saints of Joppa are grieved over this loss. Rightly so. Tabitha was a woman and a representative of Christ[5] in spaces too often neglected by both human and divine presence (read the prophets!). Not only is Luke elevating the role of women in the work of the gospel and in his narrative about the movement of the Holy Spirit (which should expose us in our own context),[6] he is also highlighting that losing this one who brings well-being to her neighbors and glory to God, leaves a massive gap in bringing God’s presence to those who need God’s presence the most: the widows…whom God cares about very much! So, the disciples having heard that Peter was in Lydda, and Lydda being close to Joppa, they sent two men [to Joppa] beseeching Peter, “Do not hesitate and pass through [and] come to us immediately!” (v. 38).

Peter’s response? Now, after rising Peter went to them (v.39a). Peter doesn’t waste a moment to help these saints over in Joppa who lost a beloved representative of Christ. Luke tells us more, After he arrived, they brought him up into the upper-room, and the widows stood by him weeping and showing [him] tunics and many cloaks Dorcas was making being with them (v.39b-c). These poor and too often neglected widows lose the one who cares for them, the one who made them feel seen and heard and loved; this is what Peter enters when he arrives.[7] But it’s more than comfort Peter is bringing. For Luke (and Peter) in this moment a massive (divinely inspired) statement is occuring: women matter, their works matter, their bodies matter.[8] Luke tells us, Now, after Peter cast everyone out [of the room], he also placed [his] knees [on the ground] and prayed, and turning to the body, he said, “Tabitha, rise!” And she does. Now her eyes opened, and after seeing Peter she sat up. Peter acts like Christ and commands the dead woman to rise. Those held captive to death (both Tabitha and the widows) are not held captive anymore; they’re liberated, by this regular person through the power of the Holy Spirit who works in them and through them to overturne the kingdom of humanity and establish the reign of God.[9] Just as the women were the first to hear of the resurrection of Christ from death, so too did a woman first experience the life out of death that is characteristic of the reign of God wrought by the Holy Spirit moving through regions bringing God glory![10] Luke tells us, Now, after giving her his hand he raised her, and after calling out [to] the saints and the widows, he presented her [to them] living. Now it became known throughout all of Joppa, and the many believed in the Lord. And the Holy Spirit is not only moving through acceptable regions but is breaking down false boundaries[11] originally demarcating clean and unclean: the glory of God and God’s divine mission to liberate the captives know no walls and barriers. Luke concludes, Now it happened [Peter] stayed a sufficient number of days in Joppa with a certain Simon the Tanner. Just like Paul, Peter is in the clutches of a God on the move, caught up in the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.[12]

Conclusion

Peter and Paul present to us the two best examples of regular, human beings—like you and me—who are caught up in the transcending and unyielding resurrection life that starts with Christ and continues with his disciples by the power of the Holy Spirit. I think Peter and Paul are intimidating to us. I think it’s easier to ask WWJD rather than WWPD because their recorded actions bring the divine pathos down to our level. It’s safe when Jesus does something because we can kind of dismiss it: well…he’s like the Son of God…so… But when it’s the former know-it-all and the former fisherman, the flames of those actions burn close to our skin. Because, as it turns out, like Paul and Peter, we have skin in this game and this game participates in the divine passion for the cosmos. Peter, a regular guy, calls Tabitha into (new) life from death and liberates Aeneas from the captivity of being paralyzed; this puts us on the hook as we begin (again) to walk in the way of the ascended Jesus and the Spirit that is to come. Both Peter and Paul ask us to think about what it means to be Christian and to do Church. Beloved, like Peter and Paul, we, too, by and in Christ, get to bring love where there is indifference, liberation where there is captivity, and life where there is death.

[1] Willie James Jennings, Acts, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2017), 99. “He is on the road and comes to Lydda to be among the living saints.”

[2] Jennings, Acts, 99. “Jesus is God drawing the everyday into holiness, into God’s own life. Everyday people are made holy in Christ. Everyday people are made holy by Christ, and this is a holiness that will last, not be episodic, and constitute a new space for living life and knowing ourselves.”

[3] Jennings, Acts, 99-100. “Once again a marvelous act, a touchable miracle, will turn people to the Lord (v. 35). This is repetition that illumines the inexhaustible riches of Gods love for the fragile creature and Gods desire to constantly touch us, hold us, and announce the victory over death. There is yet more for Peter in this journey as he is approached by two disciples form another city (Joppa) for the sake of one disciple who has died.”

[4] Jennings, Acts,99. “Peter returns to center stage and engages in a bit of wayfaring life, echoing again his history of following Jesus and doing as his savior had done.”

[5] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Tabitha’s life even in the fragments we gain in this story, hangs together beautifully as someone devoted to helping people, especially widows.”

[6] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Tabitha, the disciples of Jesus—Luke opens her story inside of Peter’s journey and in so doing makes a point more powerful for us in our time than probably for him in his time. Tabitha, a woman, is a disciple of Jesus. Whether this vignette is evidence of Luke’s positive view of women or not he has certainly gives us a plateau from which to view a new future in which men and women in Christ have a different way of seeing themselves—as disciples.”

[7] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Widows, that group of people vulnerable in ancient and current time, made vulnerable by death’s sting, have always been a special concern for God and here for Tabitha as well. …So the widows weep. They weep for her and maybe for themselves. We do not know if Tabitha was in fact one of them, but we do know that they claimed her as one of whare for them. Here glory joins strong grief because to lose someone who cares for the weak and vulnerable, whose life is turned toward making a difference in the world and who is making a difference, is a bitter loss. The widows have lost Tabitha and a disciple is gone. This is what Peter steps into in Joppa.”

[8] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Peter’s presence declares an unmistakable truth: women matter. This woman matters, and the works she does for widows matters to God. It matters so much that God will not allow death the last word. Others had been raised form the dead in the Gospels and in Luke’s Gospel…but this is different. This not a little girl or the brother of a friend of Jesus; this is a disciple raised from the dead. Tabitha is not finished in life or service.”

[9] Jennings, Acts, 100-101. “‘Tabitha, get up.’ Peter repeats Jesus. Tabitha is an activist who lives again in resurrection power. Her body has been quickened by the Spirit, and her eyes are opened again to see a new day. She has work to do and joy to give to the widows: you have not been abandoned, dear widows, God has heard your weeping and returned her to you.”

[10] Jennings, Acts, 101. “It is not accident that the first disciple to have this little tase of the resurrection isa woman, because it was a woman who gave birth to the resurrection. And Peter is there once again to see a miraculous sign point to faith’s direction—many who found out about this believe in the Lord (v. 42).”

[11] Jennings, Acts, 101. “The story, however, does not end there with Tabitha, because Peter stays in Joppa, and who he stays with points to an earth-shattering future.”

[12] Jennings, Acts, 101. “He stays with Simon, a tanner. Tanners worked with death flesh—the skin of animals and tanners were, theologically speaking, unclean. Few if any pious Jews would normally or easily stay with a tanner, but here was Peter with Somin the tanner. Peter is indeed moving from saints to saints, and soon he will find out just how far the generosity and mercy of a holy God reaches. Soon he will see just how far God will extend holy place and holy people. Peter is with a man who touches the unclean, and soon he will see God do the same.”

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Summoned out of Death and into Life

Psalm 30:1a-b,2-3 I will exalt you, God, because you have lifted me up… O Abba God, I cried out to you, and you restored me to health. You brought me up…from the dead; you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.

Introduction

Have you ever been dead set that you were absolutely, positively, without any doubt, completely and totally, 100% right? Like, nothing was going to drag you from that throne of being right. Like, you knew you were right and then your knowing knew and then that knowing knew you were 100%, beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt right? Like, the level of right that makes you wager bets when you don’t like to wager bets ever. Like, that confidence bordering on smug arrogance type of knowing you’re right…

I’m sure you’ve never been there, but I’ve been there. Whether as a mom, a wife, a scholar, a priest there have been times where I’m certain I’ve got all those little knowing ducks in a row. I know this: this thing, this person, this concept, this best method, this ritual. But the reality is that everything I do know changes. Human beings don’t stay the same, they grow and change; concepts are always subject to change with new information and research; best methods change, it’s why parenting looks so different today than it did yesterday—same goes for any industry moving along with rapidly changing technology; even sacred rituals change, anyone here looking to head back into the catacombs to do church? In short, things change (animate and inanimate). When we are absolutely, positively convinced that we know we are right, everyone else will become wrong, and we will absolutely, positively promote death rather than life, indifference rather than love, captivity rather than liberation.

Acts 9:1-6

According to Luke, Saul enters the scene at the very beginning of chapter 8, right after the death of Stephen. Stephen the first deacon of the church and the first martyr of those who follow the way. He was condemned to death for preaching the gospel and exposing the Sanhedrin for what and who they were. Luke tells us in 8:1, And Saul was pleased with the destruction of [Stephen].  Saul then disappears from the narrative for the rest of chapter 8 only to resurface at the beginning of chapter 9.

At the beginning of chapter 9, Luke tells us, Now Saul, still breathing threats and killing the disciples of the Lord, approached the high priest and asked for letters from him to the synagogues in Damascus so that he might find certain people being of the way, men and also women, and after binding them he might lead them into Jerusalem (vv. 1-2). Not only did Saul approve of the death of a deacon proclaiming the liberative gospel to a people stuck in captivity, he also continued in hot pursuit of the people who, because of proclamations like Stephen’s, began following the way (the way of faith in Jesus the Christ, God’s son). These who followed the way, for Saul, were those who were no straying from God and God’s law, they were heretics and blasphemers, and this deserved nothing less than imprisonment and death. What Luke is painting for his audience is a picture of a devoted zealot of the law of God; Saul’s mission was to make sure no Israelite strayed from the right way, the one he knew, the one upheld by decades and centuries of tradition. Saul isn’t a deviant or miscreant; he is a killer as one who kills in the name of the law and has authority to do so. Saul is absolutely sold out that this one way, the way he knew, the way he had been trained in, the way he had been raised in and schooled in was the one and only way that God could and would work. According to Luke, Saul was willing do whatever it took to ensure that what is remains as is even if it means imprisoning and executing anyone who lives, believes, says, and does otherwise.[1]

According to Luke, Saul is closed in on himself and what he knows and believes to be true and right; he is, as Martin Luther would say, curved in on himself and violence thrives among people curved in on themselves, convinced of their own rightness and goodness, and devoted to their ideologies reinforcing their status quo which encourages their curved-in-ness.[2] Against this type of person, this one that Saul is, the disciples and followers of the way have absolutely no chance; their way of seeing the world and understand justice will collapse under the weight of Saul’s because there is no one stronger and more resistance to listening and seeing than the one who is curved in on himself.[3]

Saul, in being dead-set, absolutely and positively right is on a collision course with the reality of God—a God who is all about the interruption and disruption of the status-quo holding God’s beloved captive unto death.[4] Saul, the pursuer, is about to realize that he is the one being pursued.[5] Luke tells us, But while he was going near to Damascus, it happened that a light from heaven suddenly flashed around him like lightening, (v. 3). Saul collides—full steam—into God by way of his errant misconception of the world and of God’s activity of the world. Notice that the text does not tell us that Saul was eagerly searching for God because God was hidden and Saul couldn’t find God. Notice that the text tells us very plainly that God found Saul when Saul wasn’t looking for him. Saul was interrupted and disrupted on his way—stopped in his tracks by being tossed to the ground—and divinely readjusted and corrected and set on God’s way and on God’s track.[6]

Because of Saul’s encounter with God, he gains deep insight into who this God is. This is not the God of the cold tablets demanding blood sacrifice for disobedience or imprisonment for fracture. Rather, the God Saul encounters is a God who intimately knows the pain of those whom this God loves. And, Saul is not only disrupted and interrupted, but altogether unmade under the weight of a very intimate question:[7] and after he fell to the earth he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (v.4) Saul can’t answer the question because of the exposure: Saul isn’t absenting God from the pain and suffering he is causing; he’s directly hurting God, the one whom he thought he was protecting from offense and pain.[8] The only thing Saul can do is ask his own question in response to God’s question posed to him: And [Saul] said, “Who are you, Lord?” And [Jesus said], “I, I am Jesus whom you, you are persecuting…” (v.5). Saul is crushed under this divine revelation, in this divine encounter[9] with a God who resides in the flesh of Israel and not an abstract God hiding behind tablets.[10] Saul’s entire person and being, soul and body, mind and heart will be beckoned forth from that death and into the new life God has planned for him: being guided by the justice and rightness of God revealed through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit and not according to his own conception of justice and rightness.[11]

Conclusion

Just as God felt the pain of the Israelites suffering under the oppression and violence and death of the government of Egypt, so too did God feel the pain of God’s beloved as Saul sought out and imprisoned and executed the followers of the way; just like in Easter, if you mess with God’ beloved you mess with God because nothing stands between God and God’s beloved, not even death and those who believe they have the power and authority to deal in it.[12]

When the women who entered the empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning, they were asked, why do you look for the living among the dead?I believe this morning, when Jesus asks Saul, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”, it is the exact same question. While the women were looking for the living among the dead, Saul was dealing out death where there was life. Both are stuck in an old way and order of understanding God in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. Anyone can become stuck in death in one of two ways: passively by assuming God can’t do something new and actively by being convinced God would never do something beyond what you absolutely positively know to be right.

So, we are put on notice today by Luke’s words. It’s not about us being right and assuming we know what God is up to because of the way it’s been done for years and years. When we become dead set on being right, we will bring violence and death to others as we force them to comply and obey by dragging them into the prison of “our way or the highway”; this always will lead to sanctioning death. As we proceed through this Easter season, we are continually beckoned into that new life, new love, new liberation we received through the empty, unsealed tomb. Beloveds, we are of light, love, liberation, and life; let us live like we believe it.

[1] Jennings, Acts, 90. “Saul is a killer. We must never forget this act. He kills in the name of righteousness, and now he wants legal permission to do so. This is the person who travels the road to Damascus, one who has the authority to take life either through imprisonment or execution. No one is more dangerous than one with the power to take life and who already has mind and sight set on those who are a threat to a safe future.”

[2] Jennings, Acts, 91. “Such a person is a closed circle relying on the inner coherence of their logic. Their authority confirms their argument and their argument justifies heir actions and their actions reinforce the appropriateness of their authority. Violence, in order to be smooth, elegant, and seemingly natural, needs people who are closed circles.”

[3] Jennings, Acts, 90-91. “The disciples of the Lord, the women and men of the Way, have no chance against Saul. They have no argument and certainly no authority to thwart his zeal. They are diaspora betrayers of the faith who are a clear and present danger to Israel. This is how Sauls sees them his rationality demands his vision of justice.”

[4] Willie James Jennings, Ephesians, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2017), 90. “God disrupts the old order by interrupting lives. Luke has removed every temporal wall that might separate in our thinking the God who moved in ancient Israel from the God present in the world in Jesus from this God of untamable love. This is that same Holy One, and Saul too will fall into the hands of this desiring God.”

[5] Jennings, Acts, 91. “But what Saul doe not yet know is that the road to Damascus has changed. It is space now inhabited by the wayfaring Spirit of the Lord. Saul pursues, but he is being pursued.”

[6] Jennings, Acts, 91. “The long history of the church has turned the Damascus road into shorthand for a life-changing experience, and rightly so, because Saul, the closed circle, is broken open by God. Yes, a killer was confronted and stopped in his tracks, but equally powerful, the rationality for his murderous actions was shattered.”

[7] Jennings, Acts, 91. “There is no rationale for killing that remains intact in the presence of God. The power of this event almost overwhelms its textual witness. Luke is handling holy fire now. The question comes directly to Saul. This is a question too massive for him to handle because it is an intimate one.”

[8] Jennings, Acts, 91. “The question casts light on the currencies of death that we incessantly traffic in, and it has no good answer. The only good answer is to stop. But now this is God’s question. It belongs to God. It belongs with God. Hurt and pain and suffering have reached their final destination, the body of Jesus. Now the divine presence will be revealed to Saul, not simply divine revelation, but a new revelation.”

[9] Jennings, Acts, 92. “Saul turns form defending the name of the Lord to serving Jesus, and for this we will soon suffer. He has crossed that line that separates this faith from all others. He has heard the voice of a crucified God. There is a stark truth here in this conversation to poignant that we sometimes ignore its abiding effect on us. Saul experienced the Lord Jesus. He encountered him, and this made Saul vulnerable. Experiencing the Lord Jesus makes us vulnerable.”

[10] Jennings, Acts, 91-92. “The Lord has a name…This is the bridge that has been crossed in Israel. The Lord and Jesus are one. This is the revelation that now penetrates Saul’s being and will transform his identity. He turns from the abstract Lord to the concrete Jesus. A future beckons in the pivot from holy faith to holy flesh. …Saul moves from an abstract obedience to a concrete one, from the Lord he aims to please to the One who will direct him according to divine pleasure.”

[11] Jennings, Acts, 91-92. “Discipleship is principled direction taken flight by the Holy Spirit. It is the ‘you have hard it said, but I say to you’—the continued speaking of God bound up in disruption and redirections.”

[12] Jennings, Acts, 92-93. “Jesus is one with the bodies of those who have called on his name and followed in his way by the Spirit. Their pain and suffering is his very own. This too is scandal. This too is a crossed line. They mystery of God is found in human flesh, moving in and with the disciples who are a communion of suffering and witness to life Saul is meeting a God in Jesus who is no alien to time, but one who lives the everyday with us….Yet just as he confronted Saul, this God is no passive participant in the suffering of the faithful, but one who has reconciled the world and will bring all of us to the day of Jesus Christ. Saul has entered that new day.”

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