Midweek Lenten Message #5

April 1, 2020

Psalm 22: 24

“Jesus Sings the Song of Complete Satisfaction.”

“Now I am satisfied.”  The parent looks at the room cleaning their son or daughter completed finally and everything is completed to satisfaction.  The garbage is cleaned up.  The bed is made.  The dirty clothes are thrown down to the laundry room.  All articles are put in their proper place, and the floor is vacuumed.  In every case, no matter the task, parent to child, teacher to student, boss to worker, there is a check list that needs to be completed in order for the one in charge to say, “It is complete to satisfaction.”  “I am satisfied.” 

We have been meditating on a song groaned in agony these past Wednesdays.  It is a funeral dirge of affliction and suffering, of abandonment and complete embarrassment.  It is gasped with piercings and the fear of being ripped apart by marauding circles of bullies of hatred.  Who could be singing this?  Certainly, we can identify with King David’s words put to the notes on a page.  We’ve experienced the sadness, the affliction, and depression that he did and maybe we do today due to the present circumstances that just a few weeks ago seemed like an impossible nightmare.  But there is more.  By the Spirit’s inspiration, there is another who is groaning these Words from some distant future on a place where skulls have been scattered outside the city wall up on hill, so he was nailed and hung and left to die.  This is Jesus’ song, and the conclusion that he sings is satisfying. 

How can one possibly satisfy the criteria set down to stand unified and embraced by the Holy God?  Does it seem cruel or arrogant that a God would have holy, perfect demands that should have to be made in order that His supreme justice would be satisfied?  The problem is not with God.  The problem is with us who were conceived and born as children of the rebellion—a rebellion that swept over all of time and space on this earth making God out to be the liar, the selfish scoundrel, and us, mankind, out to be the gods.  But justice must be satisfied, the criteria of holiness must be met or even an eternity for us in the agony of hell is too short to satisfy the supreme holy justice of a God zealous for his creation to be like he created us to be—holy according to his image. 

And it’s sin that creates the affliction—the guilt over what we’ve done or failed to do, the damage that we’ve done to ourselves or to the personal relationships that God has blessed us with, the effects of sin in this world and the attacks that are whipped up by the enemy, all of it because sin separates us from God.  And in those afflictions, in that pain, people whip up their own ideas about satisfying a perceived angry Divine judge.  “If you broke it, you have to fix it.”  Pay for it with your effort, your sacrifices, your money, your blood, sweat, and tears.  But none of it satisfies because there’s an elephant in the room like the Tax Collector in the temple came to realize, so we must, too, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” 

I can’t satisfy God, and you can’t, either.  He hasn’t despised or scorned the sufferings of you and me, the afflicted because of sin, instead he knit his Son together in the womb in our likeness to ‘present him as the sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood.  He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time.”  God doesn’t just ignore or wish away the debt that we owe.  But he satisfied them in the holy life blood of his Son.  A holy life needed to be offered, and it was.  Consider the power of God and the wisdom of God found in the cross.  He proclaimed, “This is my whom I love, with him I am well pleased.”  But Jesus groans, “Why have your forsaken me?”  God is pleased with His Son and forsakes him at the same time!  Holy and righteous Jesus who had done no wrong becomes cloaked and hung with the stench of our wickedness and sin wrapped around him.  He simultaneously hid his face from the one who became our sin, and opened it up to the Son he loved.  He equally did not listen to the cries of the one who became our sin and listened to his cries for delivery—both at once.  His holy criteria was satisfied in the one who suffered completely for us while covered in our sin and guilt, and God’s wrath has passed over so that God could comfort us.

And God raised Jesus Christ from the dead.  He was completely satisfied.  Sin was killed and buried, and death was mortally wounded.  The devil’s head, his will and ways were crushed and chained.  Jesus sings this song for us who still struggle, who are abused and bruised by the effects of sin in our own fleshly members and in this world, which do cause affliction and suffering.  However, God uses all of those forces of evil as a loving Father in discipline to his beloved children to produce a harvest of righteousness and peace, as a cleansing fire that polishes and purifies a simple faith that he has given which trusts that Jesus has provided the only perfect satisfaction in our place to God.  God looks at you and me, sinners that we are, in the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ covering us in our baptism and sings joyfully, “I am completely satisfied with you, my son/my daughter.”  Amen.   

Midweek Lenten Series #4
Psalm of Suffering:  A Look at the Passion from Psalm 22
March 25, 2020
“Jesus Groans the Song of Complete Agony.”
 
Much has been spoken and written about the horror of crucifixion.  For me personally, after having seen the movie “Passion of the Christ,” just once, it was enough for me to know the absolute agony of what human beings can do to other human beings.  It would stand to reason, I believe, why it was that God the Holy Spirit inspired the gospel writers to simply write, “And there they crucified him.”  All of the horrible effects of what ‘the cross’ or ‘crucifixion’ meant, an invention from Romans was on display with those simple 5 words carried out upon the Messiah, God’s Son, the innocent and holy one. 
 
We have a prayer of the day, I believe on Good Friday that simply says to the effect, “By the tree of the garden, the serpent caused the fall and brought death to all, and by the tree of Golgotha, Jesus Christ brought forgiveness and life.”  Abraham was told in a beautifully bitter foreshadowing of what the Trinity would have to undergo for the world’s rebellion and his grace to rescue all mankind, “Take your Son, your only Son, Isaac and go and sacrifice him as an offering to the Lord.”  Isaac carried the wood, a teenager who must have understood what it was that needed to be done or he would have bolted away easily from his 100+ year old father.  And Moses made the prophesy that would set a shadow out for the coming Messiah, “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” 
 
But there was no knowledge of crucifixion until the Romans.  David wouldn’t have had any understanding of it.  Perhaps in battle he had taken some spear points in the hands or the feet or had been in sword battles leading the people of Israel that required gashes on his hands and feet, so what could he have possibly been talking about when this band of dogs, this wicked group of congregants gathered around him and created such an agony as he was stripped naked to count all of his bones and take his last known garment and cast lots for it to leave him with nothing at all.  Could he have ever dreamed up a more agonizing scenario for himself?  No, this was the Spirit’s song of suffering—the Spirit of Jesus from the cross.  These were the words of David’s great grandson suffering the agony of what a different completely different unknown race of people would do to him so many years later. 
 
The cross and the agony of crucifixion was created for the innocent and holy Son of God, the Messiah.  In eternity, the Son of the Father in perfect obedience knew that his coming into this world through the Virgin would encounter the cross and cry out, “They have pierced my feet and my hands.”  And Isaiah would utter the words, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquity.  The punishment that brought us peace was upon him and by his wounds we are healed.”  Jesus groaned the song from the cross of complete and total agony. 
 
He was stripped of his clothes.  His last garment was treated as a reflection of what the soldiers and onlookers thought of him as they gloated at him and hurled insults at him—even the two who were on either side of him.  Taking that garment, they cast lots as to who would be the new owner of what covered Jesus’ bones that were all on display for all to see.  The ‘dogs’ assembled to rip him apart, but that was not what agonized him the most.  It was the stroke that justice brought as the innocent and holy became the recipient and owner of all of our guilt and shame. 
 
It’s agony outside right now.  Can we even go outside?  Can we even take a trip to the park?  Our normal way of life is interrupted as we’ve heard by an invisible enemy.  “I want this.  I want that.  I don’t want to help my parents.  I don’t want to pay attention to my wife’s needs.  I don’t want to listen to my husband’s loving headship that filters out perhaps not so loving.  I don’t want to pay attention to what I have to do for school.  It’s out and they’re probably going to cancel school anyway.”  Is it really agony?  Or is the agony what our sinful selves have dragged and locked us up inside of to value the valueless to a greater extent.  The real invisible enemy is sin within our flesh and blood, the damned demon with his visceral hatred of God and God’s people, and a decaying world that Satan whips up to do his bidding or so he thinks.  And this is the agony—the agony of complete and total separation from God because sin into death.  But Jesus was cursed and nailed to the cross for us, too, as we’d heard this past Sunday, “to condemn sin in sinful man so that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us.” 
 
Our spiritual heartache and agony has been satisfied in full by our suffering Savior, and his groaning song sent forth from tortured mind is in his joy to turn our hearts to a song of praise and joy for what his sacrifice has won for us—complete and total peace with God and with each other—complete and total forgiveness and real life here in this time of grace only to be followed by the eternal peaceful life with the Tree of Life and the river on high that makes glad the city of God where we are already made citizens. 
 
And this bloody, gory, and unspeakable agony that Jesus submitted himself underneath for us was found to completely satisfy the righteous demands of His Father and bring God’s approval upon each of us about which we will conclude in the meditation for the week to come.  Amen. 
 

Lent 4
March 22, 2020
Romans 8: 1-10
“Our Real-Life Hinges on the Answer to This One Question:  Do I Have the Spirit of Christ?” 
 
Looking, reading and listening through these 10 verses to the church in Rome from the Apostles’ Spirit-inspired pen seems to have us on the edge of our seats to answer the clinching question.  The answer to the question mean continued doom and gloom or a spiritual breeze of summer-sanctified air through our heart and mind of the peace that only our Lord Jesus can offer to us.  “Do I have the Spirit of Christ?”
 
In other words, “Am I IN CHRIST?”  Or to put it another way, “Does God the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ live within me?”  Paul says in another place, your body and mine are temples of the Holy Spirit.  He lives and dwells making use of our flesh and blood, our minds and hearts as his dwelling, his permanent home—like a temple.  But how do I know that I have or possess the Spirit of Christ, i.e. God the Holy Spirit? 
 
Some people have been cruelly taught in the Christian Church that in order to know that you have the Spirit of Christ or God the Holy Spirit, you have to pursue and achieve the so-called gifts that are above and beyond just the normal seven-fold gifts of the Holy Spirit:  peace, love, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control.  People are taught that if you have the so-called gifts of ‘speaking in tongues,’ or ‘gifts of healing,’ or some other so-called ‘charismatic’ gifts then you can know for sure, and those who haven’t been given the ‘gifts’ are some how left in doubt, and those who ‘teach themselves,’ or are ‘taught’ to do them must be loved or appreciated more by God.  The result is that a cruel dichotomy is imagined between those who supposedly do have the Spirit and those who do not. 
 
The bottom-line for everyone to figure the answer out to this question is simple.  “People have to turn into themselves in order to find something that will tell them that God the Holy Spirit lives within them and that they live in Christ.”  But turning into ourselves for proof that we have the Spirit of Christ, or God the Holy Spirit only leads to more chains and more of a pall over our heads that one can’t even bear.
 
When the apostle uses the words, ‘flesh’ in our text and the ‘Spirit,’ he’s talking about on one hand the regime control of the one and the freedom of the other.  He’s not saying flesh because our body is bad, and our soul is good.  And he’s not saying that we should hate our bodies and seek, like some have falsely thought, to harm them into submission while seeking after only the quote/unquote ‘spiritual’ or things without a body.  He’s just using the terms to talk about how we are children born of flesh and blood, body and soul, from Adam and recipients of the consequences of the rebellion of the garden of Eden at the beginning.  He’s saying that we have been born into a length of chain, a prison, being dragged or stumbling about towards a hopeless shadow of death and eternal condemnation under the oppressive regime of sin and death.  While on the other hand, the loving rule of God our heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ has set us free together with the whole world.  
 
When he talks about the Spirit, that’s God the Holy Spirit’s work of calling us by the gospel in Word and Sacrament in spite of our inability to choose him or come to him to know him.  “Spirit” as he says is all the beautiful creative work of the new creation of us that God the Holy Spirit does to our mind and our heart, our bodies and souls making his home out of our heart and his temple out of our bodies, i.e. the law or governing body of the Spirit of life.  But again, everything for our comfort and peace hinges on this important answer to the question:  Do I have the Spirit of Christ?  Does God the Holy Spirit live in me?
 
And again, looking inward and making the comparison of what we find in our ‘flesh’ to what God’s law commands and threatens to punish creates more oppression.  I will despair to ever be able to save myself and be left completely hopeless chained in the darkest prison.  Paul wrote, “Those who continue to be in line with the flesh, they think and reason the things of flesh,” and, “for the mind of the flesh is death,” and again, “the mind of the flesh is enemistad (in Spanish) enmity or hatred towards God, for the mind of the flesh does not submit to God’s law nor does it have the power to submit.  Those who continue to be in flesh do not have power to please God.”  This is what we’ll always find when looking inward to the answer to this important question.  We think and reason the way our sinful nature inherited from Adam thinks and reasons.  Our life is our money, our job, our family and everything fleshly, earthly—our entertainment, our pleasure, and our health.  And without these things, we fall apart.  You can see it happening.  “If I want it and I think its good for me, then I need it and I will take it, and good luck to everyone else.”  And we suck our life out of us.  We choke it to death turning our backs to what God’s will for our lives truly is.  This mind of our nature will hate and even kill anyone who will get in way.  It is a mind controlled by death which drags us stumbling to death.  If anyone does us any harm, we’ll strike back just as hard to inflict pain.  “I demand that they love me and that they respect me and that they honor me.”  And our mind, our thinking, reasoning, planning and action is just to control the others to do what I want to them to do to me or for me.  And it’s just as strong of a vice grip as the chain of sin and death is around me to drag us to hell separated from God.  The mind of my sinful nature and yours, our flesh, will always be given a command from God or through his representatives that turn us on a dime to lash out in anger and cast blame on one of those representatives as to God himself.  Our sinful mind, our flesh and blood and soul, has no power to please God because even before we exited our mother’s womb, we were in violation of the laws holy demands.    
 
The law has a good use, but not to save us.  It was ‘emptied’ out of all of it’s power to save because it could not find anyone as a descendant of Adam and Eve, flesh, blood, and soul who could meet it’s holy and perfect demands, and so it only condemns, and that’s why we will find no peace or comfort from comparing what we find in our heart and mind to the Law’s holy and lofty demands.  If we look inward for the comforting answer to our original important question, we will have to humbly answer, “No.  I do not have the Spirit of Christ.  I am certainly ruined.”  But the good use of the law is this:  It shows me that we need something or someone to act to rescue us—to save us.             
 
So, our God acted.  He did some of the most beautifully sanctified deception to the law’s demands, to sin and death itself to win for us the victory.  He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, disguised in our flesh and blood to fool the law and to catch sin and death by surprise.  Jesus came in the likeness, the form of a sinful man, a descendant of Adam and Eve, yet he remained fully God and completely holy so as not to condemn us, but to condemn and punish sin and death within us.  “He was born of the virgin, born under the law—to redeem all of us under the law” By his perfect obedience to every last dot and mark of the law’s demands, and by his holy life blood offered in satisfaction for every sin of ours, he filled up the laws demands for us.  He came to be the fire given to ordinary water, the blood given to normal wine and flesh given to ordinary bread to wash and feed and quench us with forgiveness and life, and to unlock the chains to fall from our wrists and from our ankles.  We altogether through our baptism, “have died with Christ, and our life is now hidden with Christ in God.” 
 
No, the answer to the question is not looking inside us, but to gaze outward, to see and trust as we look to the cross still empty to the sky with Jesus’ Word by the Spirit still reverberating and having been planted within us, “It is finished.”  The answer is outside ourselves where innocent and holy Jesus in our sinful likeness was pulled down to hell in the grave for us and then rose to take a dagger to death’s belly and remove death’s sting forever and to make it the peaceful sleep that God now uses to take us home together with him, only to arouse us up body and soul, sanctified for once and all to have our real life, body and soul, flesh and blood, mind and heart together as one with Jesus forever in heaven. 
 
The most wonderful answer to the question is a rousing yes!  Yes, in Christ!  Does the Spirit of Christ live within us?  Absolutely!  Have you heard this good news today?  God the Holy Spirit has come and made your heart and mind his dwelling through this Word, the light of dawn.  Have you been baptized?  Yes, God the Holy Spirit has worked in your heart and mind to plant, water, and grow a faith that is alive and active as you are planted into your vine and have become a fruitful branch that will bear much fruit and will bear even more as the Father prunes you!  Have you and will you join in the supper of Jesus’ flesh and blood.  Yes!  God’s Spirit comes to feed your stomach while making your heart and mind his dwelling place. 
 
So the loving rule and encompassing influence of the Spirit has set you free from the oppression of sin and death.  Your mind is recreated by the resurrected and living Lord Jesus to be calculating the thinking and reason of his mind.  We think and reason and act and move in the Spirit’s breeze and life and peace.  About our earthly time of grace, we think and pray: “Your Heavenly Father knows that you need all of this, so I will seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.  I will seek to find my comfort and joy through this nutrition for my body and soul through his Word, because man doesn’t live on bread or entertainment or medicine, or doctor’s advice alone, but on every Word that comes from his mouth.  I will use God’s commands as my guide being completely, 100% in Christ a new creation, righteous and holy, to seek and plan and enact the sharing of the peace that Jesus has worked between me and between God, to cancel the debt of wrong-doings from others, and to become the servant that washes my co-workers and neighbors, my own Christian brothers and sisters, my wife’s, my children’s or my parent’s feet as their lowly servant and least in the kingdom of heaven.” 
 
The answer to our question is outside of us.  Am I in Christ?  Do I have God’s Spirit living within me?  Yes.  Look at my victorious Savior.  And there is now, today, never any condemnation or penalty in Christ Jesus.  We can freely count our fleshly heart and mind as dead and lifeless, carrying no influence over anything.  The chains have dropped, and prison door has been broken open.  We are free with life and peace in Christ.  Shout it out to the nations!  Go on a high mountain and lift up your voices to make it known.  Speak and live it quietly and humbly and confidently to your small friend or your hurting neighbor.  Yes.  It’s true.  We live in peace in Christ.  Amen. 
 

Lenten Midweek Meditation #3
March 18, 2020
Psalm 22: 12-15
“Psalm of Suffering:  Jesus Groans the Song of Complete Exhaustion.” 
 
The man is crawling on the desert floor on all fours panting and panting.  His tongue is out of his mouth.  He is miles from civilization and sees only those mirages of oasis’s off in the distance.  As he moves, they move farther and farther.  He is completely exhausted and cannot do anymore.  You even see the vultures overhead waiting for the last movement. 
 
What are the sounds like of this man’s song as he moves along the ground?  They are certainly not happy.  They are not pleasant.  They are shouts and groans for help, for rest, for a thirst to be quenched and a hunger to be filled, for shade from the hot drying sunlight. 
 
It’s only been a few days, but we’re all asking, how much more until life—our normal life—can reconvene?  Now we’re secluded into our homes without the day-to-day activities that we’ve become accustomed.  We’re still surrounded by family for the most part in some cases and can within a certain distance keep in touch with friends, but this new normal for the time being compounds what could already be a crawl through the desert wilderness of being surrounded with the life-sucking, thirst causing, enemy pounding abuse of our already spiritually exhausting causes. 
 
“I just can’t go on anymore.”  The conscience accuses.  The relationships that we’re stuck with are frayed and damaged by our mistreatment of them or theirs of us or both.  The kids won’t listen, and the parents exasperate taking their personal frustrations out on undeserving children.  The business is closed, and the store shelves are empty.  Will they close anymore?  How much crazier is this all going to get?  Where is our God?  Has he abandoned me?  Will he let me die of thirst? 
 
Jesus groans from the cross to let us know through the ancient pen of the words and notes breathed by God’s Spirit that he has taken our place.  (Verses 12-15)  “12
Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.  13 Roaring lions that tear their prey open their mouths wide against me.  14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.  My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me.  15 My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.”  I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be bull fighter having horns and the strength of that beast in the ring with me.  How about more than one, say 4 or 5 charging?  I wouldn’t want to be in the lion’s exhibit at the zoo or in the wild with a pack that is licking it’s chops and crouching ready to rip my flesh apart.  But in the spiritual sense, the forces of evil, the devil who is like a roaring lion, the bulls of the bullies and our own voices that accuse us falsely surround us to try to obliterate us in the worst way possible—to get us to despair that there is any hope at all to continue. 
 
But look!  Here is Jesus, in our flesh and blood, in our place, feeling in his body and in his wounds the curse of what we all deserve, and Jesus patiently, in loving restraint, feels his flesh ripped by the whip, and the Roman soldiers taking charge of his weakened flesh and blood—to walk the road in complete and total exhaustion while carrying our cross.  He has made our cross his very own that we might be free of the load, free of the burden. 
 
“I’m being poured out like a drink offering,” he groans as not only does he cry out, “I’m thirsty,” for some sort of liquid to satisfy his dried out palate, but as every bit of his perfect love and righteousness is being poured out as the offering and sacrifice for us to cover our sinful mistakes and wash us by the blood and water of the supper and our baptism that flowed forth from his pierced side.  You are refreshed by his sacrifice for you! 
 
And you sing in the wilderness the joyful praiseworthy deeds of the Lord.  You thirst, and the good news of Jesus’ patient endurance for you fills you with a spring of living water that wells up to eternal life in heaven whether there are groceries on the shelf or not.  That spring washes and refreshes you through to an eternal life that you hold right now as a citizen of eternal life.  Behold our matador and our lion tamer standing in our place to win the victory through what appears to be his ultimate defeat so that into the dust of death he pulls with him our sin and rises to win the victory over every enemy including the fiercest of all—death—to cause us to be filled with the hope of life even from the grave. 
 
Our suffering servant, our Savior Jesus, groans this song of complete exhaustion for us today so that we might be refreshed and rekindled in loving restraint to be willing as spouses, parents, single people, workers, and citizens to have ourselves and our new life poured out like a drink offering in loving obedience to God and in service to those with whom we have opportunity to come in contact with—even at a distance. 
 
And our song is retuned in joyful praise.  Amen. 
 

Midweek Lenten Series, "Psalm of Suffering."
March 4, 2020
Psalm 22: 1-2
"Jesus Groans the Song of Complete Abandonment

Minute 30.30
Lent 1
March 1, 2020
Romans 5: 12-19
“A DIVINE VERDICT UNDID THE DEVIL'S DAMAGE.”
 I.  A verdict following Satan's defeat
II.  A verdict forcing Satan's retreat
 

Minute 2.00  Children's Message and "Our Great Savior."  Song by CSP Student Body
Minute 17.30  Luke 18: 9-14, "Big and Small"  Message from the Pulpit
Minute 32.10  "And Can It Be."  CSP Praise Kids
Minute 38. 40 "Padre Nuestro."  CSP Student Body