Lent Midweek 3

Transcript

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The means of grace, simple word, water, wafer, and wine, are strange ways for God to work through and impart eternal life. He uses the most ordinary things to work the extraordinary. The cross is a much stranger way God works. The ordinary daily life of Christians, basic frustrations, sadnesses, trials, and tribulations are often seen as worthless or as harmful, curses, God abandoning us. How could God work in those things? Where is God? Is he hiding? But if he is hiding, it doesn't mean he's not present. He's just not seen. Or seen in how we think that he should look. Similar to word, water, bread, and wine, in the theology of the cross, we acknowledge the hiddenness of God. When we consider the theology of the cross, like the rest of Lutheran spirituality, we consider Christ, Christ's work, His presence, and how He brings us to Him. The cross is a major part of our Christian life. The theology of the cross is totally different than our current culture's focus on self-help or accomplishment. Here, it's success driven, or focused on what we can get to and how we can get to it. But the cross isn't about goal setting or personal fulfillment. The theology of the cross isn't a Lutheran form of new monasticism either, some asceticism or purposeful cultivation of unpleasant experiences to gain spiritual progress or enlightenment. Those are still the theology of glory, because it's about us and our work that improves matters. Lutheran, Christian spirituality won't be about you, and you getting more power, more pleasure, more wealth. In the theology of the cross, the cross is outside of you. It isn't self-chosen or self-imposed. It comes without your RSVP to its invitation. You can't create your own vision, your world, your own self. God has created you. You may get right for your own earthly goals, and you may get to those earthly goals, but you can't get right with God. Only Jesus is the way and the life. While God's word has wonderful wisdom for family and life, the real problems are bigger. You actually need God to be more than a coach or a therapist. You need God to diagnose your sin, to tell you your true needs, to be your creator and provider, your redeemer and the one who makes you holy. Let's not make our God manageable by only seeking his input on our manageable problems. Success-centered spirituality is trapped in a theology of glory. We want to succeed, go, fight, win, and be happy. When those things don't happen, something's wrong. So we look for ways, gods, religions, philosophies, personalities who will help us on our quest for glory. For God to be God, we think he must behave as we think he should. Churches should be perfect places of holiness without sin. We're almost there, folks. Families begin to look rather Stepford-like, not just for the wife, but for everybody all around. Problems? Gone. Sin? Nowhere to be found. All's well here. You can't see it. You can't see all those problems in sin, but they're still there. The theology of the cross calls it not by appearances. It calls the thing what it really is. Think of the appearances versus the truth at the cross of Christ. By dying as a first century Jew on a tree, God wins. In the bloody and gory asphyxiation of Jesus on the cross, God reveals his love, triumph, and glory in the best way. The divine himself works best in the lowliest things. Earlier we thought of the means of grace. And now we could maybe think of the incarnation, even. The Most High was born in a barn. To the world, a scandal. A virgin birth, no way. To lowly shepherds, working third shift, the good news. God's ways clearly aren't our ways. God is glorious, yes, he's almighty. Jesus' miracles testify to this. Yet during his ministry and thereafter, Jesus was and sadly is, disregarded by many. He had no former majesty that we should be able to spot him as God's son. He was bruised, smitten, afflicted by God, pierced for our transgressions, acquainted with grief and sorrow. He didn't run around skipping, right? He was crushed for our iniquities. His wounds heal you and me. Christ has carried not only our sins, mind you, but our infirmities and our sorrows. That is quite important in the theology of the cross that you live. While we may be quick to interrupt at this point, maybe we're just kind of sick of the sorrow, and say, but didn't he rise? Don't we confess the glory of his ascension and his exaltation? Won't he come again with glory? And won't we live forever with him in glory? Why pit the theology of the cross against the theology of glory? Can't they be the same? I think just those questions themselves show us how quick we are to jump to the glory that we forget about all that we live through here below, and how our life here below, right here and now, is central to our spirituality. How will we endure or comprehend suffering in the life of a believer if we just keep jumping to glory? The theology of the cross is how our spiritual life began with God, by the way. His law is a hammer that crushes us sinners. He makes known our shattered sinful state. No legalism or theology of glory is going to get you to God. God comes and breaks you to show you that you're a child and you must depend upon Him and Him alone for your rescue. We can't do it, but God has done it all for you. Only by Christ and His cross, only through faith in Christ crucified as the payment for your sins, is there forgiveness and life eternal. The theology of the cross is how our spiritual life continues. It's not only how it began, it's how it continues, with eternal blessings in hand, daily confessing and daily living life. Such life goes on with its ho hum and with its problems, as we pray daily, thy will be done. His will is good and gracious, but that doesn't mean that everything turns out just how you'd like it to. No frustrations, hardships, trauma, terrors, or tears. The will of God can and often does manifest itself in weakness and suffering. We don't pray, my will be done. Even our Lord Jesus Christ confessed the weakness of his flesh when he prayed, nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done. Each and every one of us has problems with the theology of glory. We want to play God and determine good and evil. We want to bend God to our will, rather than confess that Father knows best. We want to speak only of the glorious order, beauty, and goodness from creation and experience, rather than those that witness to something else. If we'd expect God to give the glory now, it ends poorly, we'll start to question God. We demand for him to explain and justify himself to us when we suffer. We cry foul. We order him to heal, to give success, to bless. We push it off our back and we say we don't want it. We're afraid of it because we don't think that God is still God. And that this God is working through the very cross that he places upon us for our eternal good. He becomes someone we didn't think he was, or we didn't think he should be. And it's hard for us to handle. It's hard to let God be God and not try and kick him off his throne. Certainly, then we have to admit that we can't manipulate him like we thought we could. So where does the theology of the cross leave us? With no pat answer, that's for sure. There's gonna be no pithy church signed slogan at the end of this one for you to take home, no. No easy answer to the why of our frustrations and afflictions. The wrestling match with God simply happens and keeps happening. So enjoy this Luther quote. The most severe trial comes upon a person when he believes that he has been forsaken and rejected by God. Such a trial comes only to the greatest of saints. If someone was doubting God's love, their own forgiveness intellection, and feeling God's absence, would you jump to thinking that that person was one of the greatest of saints? I don't think so. I think how many of us would think that that person has weak faith? Why didn't they say strong in suffering? But how many of us have experienced that and thought we were strong? We probably thought we were weak. I think this shows just how susceptible we are to the theology of glory. And how much we really do have to rely on God's word rather than our thoughts. I mean, who would think that when you're thinking God is so far from you, that's when he's most near. So that's precisely the hiddenness that's the theology of the cross, paradox that it is. God does come mercifully and gracious to us, graciously to us through suffering, when we're low. Even Saint Paul boasted of his sufferings, confessing that when he was weak, then he was strong, for Christ had said to him, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. In the hospital, on the battlefield, at the diagnosis or even the death of a loved one, our weakness can't be denied. In these moments we say it and we know it deeply in our souls. We can't do anything about this. We're helpless, all that we can do is pray. Precisely. We're helpless, but our help comes from the Lord. So we pray. We pray the Lord's prayer. That's faith. Ever since God's law crushed us, revealing our failures and weaknesses, that's what we're confessing when we pray. We're helpless without you, God. We can't save ourselves. Any and all good must be only by your mercy and grace. Our culture and human nature, which is sinful, don't like the thought of being so dependent. We don't want to be a burden on others, right? But isn't that exactly who we are as God's child? Isn't that what God says of us in his word? Doesn't he show his love for us in that exact way? We despair of ourselves. We have no self-sufficiency, no strength, no control. That's weakness, that's strength, since we're completely dependent upon God to forgive, save, and promise eternal healing and life at the last. The theology of the cross is our complete dependence upon Christ, who has met our sin and suffering in his cross. We can't boast in ourselves. We can only boast in the Lord, whom we depend on entirely. In the hymn, Chief of Sinners, which, sorry, you won't be singing tonight, but you can sing at any time if you have a hymnal. There's a little thing called Google, too, by the way, right? In the hymn Chief of Sinners, there is this beautiful little phrase, and I can usually barely get through it when we sing it, so that's probably why we're not singing it tonight. He sustains the hidden life, safe with him from earthly strife. I'm suspicious that many Christians sing this, and I don't even know if they know what they're singing. Pretty sure they don't. But I'm a pessimist sometimes. So maybe that's just too skeptic. But anywho, he sustains the hidden life, safe with him from earthly strife. I think many think that if we're just faithful, we'll be safe from earthly difficulty. And that's just simply the theology of glory again. And it leads to the classic problem of evil and suffering, denying God's existence, or believing that God is punishing or rejecting us. But what the hymn is actually teaching us when it says, He sustains the hidden life, safe with him from earthly strife. It's teaching us the theology of the cross. There is earthly strife, and there will be. You may see only a sore-covered beggar with dogs licking him. That beggar has wrestled with God and at times wondered if God cares or has abandoned him or is even there. That beggar has no clue how strong his faith is or how much progress he's made in holiness. What measure is he going to use? That's the hidden life. The world wants to measure faith by success, happiness, quote, blessings. But invisible to everyone, everyone but God, God looks at that beggar and sees his son, Jesus. He sees a holy saint who trusts in and is dependent upon God alone. What's hidden is God's saving work of faith for this earthly poor soul. So it goes. We walk by faith and not by sight. We know and feel our sins and their consequences. We have our doubts and struggles, our deep, deep hurt. That's true, it can't be denied. And it's true that you're really forgiven and clothed in Christ's righteousness. Your sins are hidden from God Himself in Christ Jesus. And though God is hidden, he's here. Hidden yet from mortal eyes, he's present right where he's promised to be, in word and sacrament for you. There we find that the cross alone is our theology. We Lutherans are theologians of the cross, baptized into his death and joined to his cross and faith. God sees you as his beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased. May God sustain this hidden life. Amen.