Of Shoes and Ships

It’s easy to forget what you’re doing. Easy to walk into a room and then stare off into space perplexedly, wondering why you came in there and why you’re holding a hammer. This is a classic danger when heroes go questing: inevitably they will walk over some enchanted ground, or they will fall under some witch’s spell, or they will dally with a fair maiden with the result being that they forget what they’re doing and some helpful squire or mentor has to come along and remind them who they are and what they’re supposed to be doing.

All throughout scripture the Lord instructs his people to remember, remember, remember. Remember the gifts of God, remember the past faithfulness of God, remember the work he has given you to do. Paul tells Timothy to stir up, or rekindle, the gift of God. So consider what God has given you, and what God has given you to do, and how God has provided for you in the past. Remember that God is remaking the world and that he is doing so by means of word and sacrament each Lord’s Day, and psalms around the dinner table, and hard and honest work throughout the week, and laundry washed and folded, and joyful marriages, businesses built, and children loved and fed and taught to fear God. The Kingdom of Christ is built in these things, and it goes forth invincibly.

One of the ways we forget the gifts and calling of God is when we stop believing that the Kingdom of Jesus shall be victorious in this world, that the will of God will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

But if we’re honest, the truth that the church will be victorious in the world is frightening. It means that we really are engaged in a great war and that what we do matters. It means that the sword in my hand is for stabbing and the shield is for blocking real arrows, and not just for looking cool until the play is over. But our God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love and of power and of a sound mind. Love for God and neighbor, the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us remaking the world, and the wisdom of Christ which looks like foolishness to the world.

So let us pray to our God for Christian courage and repent of our faithless cowardice.

Jesus said that unless a grain of wheat goes into the tomb, unless it dies and is buried, it remains alone. In other words, the way God multiplies is by death. From the very beginning this is so. God multiplied Adam by laying him down in deathlike sleep and fashioning a woman from his rib.

We don’t know what it would have been like without sin, but in this fallen world it continues this way: the woman lies down in the death of childbirth, the man puts his body on the line every Monday morning when he goes out to turn his time and sweat into the means of his family’s provision, the two of them together died to their unbridled freedom when they bound themselves in covenant marriage to the other, and they bury themselves in dishes and laundry and sick youngsters and leaky pipes and sleepless nights. These are the means by which God has ordained us to be fruitful and multiply. We die and die and die. And if we did not, we would remain alone. But in God’s great wisdom, He multiplies by means of our death.

This was true of Adam, it is true of every family, and it is far truer of Christ.

None of us really know what we’re getting into, but Jesus did. He stretched out his hands willingly to receive the Roman nails. He was the only crucifixion victim ever who wasn’t powerless, who stayed voluntarily. No one took his life from him, but he laid it down willingly. He gave up his spirit, his side was pierced as Adam’s was, and he went into the ground like a seed.

And when he rose again on Easter morning, he rose triumphant with a host of captives in his train. He rose again in order to give life abundant, life eternal to an uncountable number of saints. God multiplied by Christ’s death.

If you love your life, you will lose it. But if you hate your life in this world for the sake of loving God and neighbor, then God will raise you up as he raised Jesus. The temptation is to cling to our lives, to selfishly carve out a little bit for us. But that’s just hewing out broken cisterns, it’s putting water in a sieve. The way to save your life is follow Christ’s example, and to lose it. 

Today is Palm Sunday. On this day the church has traditionally celebrated and remembered Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a donkey before his crucifixion.

It is the Passover season, the highest of the feasts, and Jerusalem is stuffed with pilgrims. Jesus acquires a donkey, as the prophecy foretold, and enters as the Returning King. A populace welcomes him joyously, crying “Hosanna”–begging for deliverance. These are the poor and downtrodden, and they honor him with whatever they have at hand: palms cut from nearby trees, the clothes off their very backs. And this King is magnanimous enough to receive their humble adulations.

And then, as the Great High Priest, he goes to inspect the house of God, but it is leprous and must be cleansed. Imagine the scene. Imagine the commotion and noise. Imagine the authority pouring off Jesus. No one stopped him. No one interfered. Here is power and majesty. Here is one fit to sit on David’s throne.

And then he turns and heals the blind and the lame and receives the praises of children. He has no patience with sham religiosity, with the hypocrisy of the temple leaders, but he gives himself to the week and despised and small.

This is comfort and it is warning. For the fig tree that bears leaves but no fruit, there is strong warning. Matthew Henry puts it this way, “If Christ came now into many parts of his visible church, how many secret evils he would discover and cleanse! And how many things daily practised under the cloak of religion, would he show to be more suitable to a den of thieves than to a house of prayer!”

But to the contrite and lowly, to those who would call God their Father, He is abundant in mercy. He comes as conquering King, but this King, so great and mighty, has come not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

We sometimes refer to the Lord’s Day gathering of the saints as a “worship service” wherein we serve the Lord by giving Him our worship. But what is worship exactly? The term gets a bit slippery.

Some will say that everything in your life is worship, and they have a distaste for any formalism in the Lord’s Day service. While there certainly is truth to this view, the folks that holds it are often lax in actual works of righteousness and holy living. It turns out that the distaste for formalism in one area turns into irreverence in others. The principle that we are to present our bodies as living sacrifices, that all our life and work should be presented to God as a sacrifice of thanksgiving is solid, but this flows from robust weekly worship; it is not in competition with it.

Another view limits “worship” to the 2-3 songs the guy with the guitar plays up front and which you close your eyes and sway to before the sermon. This also has a grain of truth, namely that the songs we sing to God are a potent means by which we render Him the honor due His name, but it fails both in scope and execution. Meaning that it is both too narrow and also really bad at living up to its own narrowly defined claims.

Here is a simple thought experiment: Worship is that which is given to God and to God alone. What is idolatry? It is the rendering of worship to anything which is not God. So there is this thing, which we call worship, which is for God alone. The comparison to a marriage is apt. A wife is always married to her husband, and her whole life is an act of love and devotion to him, but there are also particular expressions of this devotion which cannot be overlooked and which must not be given to anyone else.

So what is God owed? Of course, He rightly claims your whole self, but also He is owed your particular praise and adoration. When we gather here, we do so in response to His lovingkindness in calling us, in order to give to Him that which is owed to no other. And when we go out from here, we go with His blessing on our heads and hands, ready to render to Him our whole selves as we carry out the work of our vocation.

And finally, practically, God is owed our fear. What we fear is as good an indicator as any of what we worship. But fear is something we owe to God alone. It is worship. Too often we talk about what this doesn’t mean (“don’t be scared of God”) and fail to consider what it does mean: that when we continually fear something other than God, we are guilty of idolatry and should repent. And this is good news, supremely good news in that it frees us from bondage to cowardice and depression, but it also reminds us of our need to confess our sins.