C, Advent 1 - Luke 21:27-28,36 "Stand Before The Son Of Man"

Luke 21:27–28, 36 (ESV) And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.  Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.

A man and woman, a dog, a horse, and a chicken, all find themselves standing before God after their time on earth, and he asks them, “What was your purpose while you lived in the world?” 

The chicken tells God that her purpose was to lay eggs for food for the man and the woman and to have baby chickens so they too could produce eggs and more chickens.  Some of us chickens would also be food for humanity too.  The chicken testified to its practice of scratching around the place eating insects, grubs, and grains of seed during the course of each day.  The chicken also joyfully tells of its production of chook poo and how it fertilises the ground.

The horse is then called to testify to its purpose to which it tells God it is a beast of burden.  We horses carry humanity on our backs, pull loads of goods, and plough paddocks with our horsepower. And, like the chicken, the horse also confesses its poo is good for the garden.

The dog is then brought forward to attest to its function in the scheme of daily activity.  The dog reveals its purpose as a protector and a friend of the man and woman.  It tells of its dogged determination of chasing down other animals like cattle and sheep, to help humans round up their herds and flocks.  But the dog also freely bears witness to the not so nice practise of eating rotten flesh, scavenging, and even returning to its own vomit from time to time.

Finally, the humans stand before God to give evidence of what their function is in the world.  But the humans don’t know what to say to God.  They didn’t realise they had to stand before God.  In fact, they had forgotten God existed and thought they were the ultimate reality on earth.

Humanity has forgotten its function!  What is our purpose in life?  When Jesus returns how will we stand before the Righteousness of God. 

How does one stand before the Son of Man?  Face to face, toe to toe with Jesus Christ on the last day we will all stand before the Son of Man!  And as we stand before him, the full account of our lives will be revealed down to the last dot and tittle. How does one stand before the Son of Man?

The Son of Man is a title that Jesus often used for himself and often connected with his coming at the end of time.  Jesus is also the Son of God, but he never uses this title. Rather, it is spoken of him by Gabriel the Archangel when Jesus was conceived in Mary. He is named the Son of God in the linage of man in the genealogy of Adam.  The Devil, demons, and the Jews all accuse him in connection with being the Son of God.  But Jesus lived, suffered, and died as the Son of Man, and during this time promised his return as the Son of Man.

In stark contrast to Jesus calling himself the Son of Man, we position ourselves as sons of ourselves, second to no one.  Each of us would prefer to be recognised as heroes of humanity rather than a son of man. 

Man in his misogyny and females in their feminism, both challenging each other and turning in on the centrality of their humanity, seek to stand aloof in one’s own righteousness. Being a son of man like Jesus doesn’t appeal to us, as something to which we might want to attain or to one whom we would want to submit.

But Jesus promises, “…they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.  Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  (Luke 21:27–28 ESV)

And he continues, “But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” (Luke 21:36 ESV)

To understand what Jesus is telling us about straightening up, raising your head, and standing before the Son of Man in the future, we need to see what Jesus teaches us about standing before the Son of Man in the word of God.

Jesus addresses how a person stands when he tells a parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt:  “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’  But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’  I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other.” (Luke 18:9–14a ESV)

Jesus stands before humanity as the servant Son of Man.  Then Jesus will stand before humanity with power and great glory at the end of time.

Jesus tells us, the Son of Man comes to us in this life and knocks, he says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” (Revelation 3:20 ESV)

And, “…once the master of the house has risen and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then he will answer you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’  Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’  But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!’  In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out.”  (Luke 13:25–28 ESV)

Jesus stands to serve, and he will come and stand to see if we have received his service.  Those who do not want his service in this life will continue in that.  Those who realise they need his service and allow him to be our servant will enter the eternal service of God the Father where there is eternal peace.

Jeremiah looked forward to the time of Jesus’ service of righteousness in a time when salvation and security on earth seemed fleeting.  He says, “In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely. And this is the name by which it will be called: ‘The LORD is our righteousness.’” (Jeremiah 33:16 ESV)

It is advantageous for us, as we enter the Advent season,  to let the light of Christ serve you.  Let him illuminate your sin and save you as he stands before you and knocks.  Let God function in your life as your God so you can stand in his eternal kingdom functioning as saints saved for all eternity. 

For the kingdom and the power and the glory belongs to the Son of Man. And he stands before us, offering himself as gift, today and every day, until he returns with all power and glory. Amen.

B, Last Sunday of Church Year, Proper 29 - Daniel 7:14 & Revelation 1:7-8 "Jesus Please Finish the Cheese"

 

Adam Cheeseman loves cheese.  For Adam, too much cheese seemed never to be enough. Cheese was Adam’s beginning and end.

To ask when cheese came into Adam’s life, showed that asking the question, meant one did not really know Adam.  Cheese was always there for Adam. It was a part of his being.  He lived for cheese. Without cheese, life had no purpose for Adam. 

It’s hard to know when cheese first became known to Adam.  It seemed that from the time his mother weened him off the breast he had a piece of cheese in his mouth.  As he grew and his mother asked what he wanted to eat, he would say, “cheese please!”

Because he loved cheese so much, he loved what his family did – milk cows!  To Adam it seemed that God put cows on earth for one purpose, and that was for milk to make cheese for Adam to eat. 

Adam met a girl in the cheese pavilion at the local show.  He fell in love with her from the moment he laid eyes on her, carrying a platter of cheeses for sampling.  Her name was Yvonne Curdle.

The Cheeseman and Curdle families were soon celebrating a wedding.  At the breakfast they toasted the speeches with the finest cheeses to ever come from the Cheeseman and Curdle family farms.

Adam and Yvonne lived on the Cheeseman farm, they milked cows, they made cheese, and soon there were little cheese men running around as they continued to live a cheesy life.  But sadness came when Adam’s parents died. At their wakes, they ate cheese.

But the life of Adam Cheeseman was not all that it seemed.  Those who didn’t like cheese were unacceptable to Adam.  He could not understand why folk didn’t like cheeses.  And soon all hell broke loose when Yvonne wanted to make a cheese with fruit in it.  This was sacrilege, you don’t put fruit in cheese, it’s just not right! 

But things grew worse when the children did not want to eat cheese anymore.  They became cheesed off and  loathed the sight of cheese.  They wanted to make the milk into blancmange, custards, and puddings.  For Adam this was nonsense.  The Cheeseman children eventually deserted the farm to follow their craving  for the sweet desire of desserts.

Life went on day in day out dairying, churning out cheese.  Adam could not stop making cheese and eating cheese.  When he closed his eyes to sleep there was cheese, when he had a dream, it was about cheese. When he had nightmares, what was it about?  Not having… cheese!  He never went on holidays and soon enough the cheesy lifestyle caught up with him.  One might say he was addicted to cheeses.

So, he died and was laid to rest in a cheese-coloured coffin.  But even in the afterlife there was an eternity of cheese.  Was this heaven or was this hell?  One thing for sure, it was more cheese.

What is the cheese in your life? To where do you run for comfort?  What competes inside of your secret self for supremacy?  Does the cheese you choose end up cheesing your off?  What cheese do you consume? The one you can’t stop eating, despite the desire becoming sour!

What is your choice of cheese in your life?  Is it pleasurable feelings from food, drink, or sex? Is it the need to be in control, to manipulate others with your will, or any other lust for power, ordering others from your ideals of goodness?  Is it amassing wealth or assets, or other things that profit you and enslave you in this life?  Or is it position and popularity where you act to be seen, and are seen to gossip, propping up and cutting down the poppies around you.

There is nothing wrong with pleasure, popularity, profit, and power in themselves.  They are all gifts from God.  But when they become like the cheese in Adam Cheeseman’s life, they are idols that wrestle one’s attention away from he on whom our attention needs to be focused, as we move towards the end of life here on earth.

Adam’s imbalance to cheese might seem silly.  But there’s nothing silly about our sin which turns the way we live, into evil.  Despite how good we believe it to be.  So significant is the seriousness of sin that Jesus hung in the balance to save us from sin.

When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.  (John 19:30 ESV)

The sins that seem sweet at first and end up souring our lives need to be stopped, they need to be finished.  These sins are kingdoms that temp us away from God, just as Adam and Eve were tempted to start their own kingdom only to be thrown out of the Garden and God’s presence.

The question for you today?  As God’s Kingdom comes, are you for his Kingdom or are you building your own kingdom of cheeses like Adam Cheeseman?

God works to end your cheesy kingdoms that serves only to constipate your life, so you become bound up within yourself.  God wants to cleanse you from within.  He wants to finish you, your old Adam, so you give up your spirit and he can fill you with the Holy Spirit.

Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:7–8 ESV)

Life is not about what pleases us!  No one has ever come or will ever come to God the Father through nice cheeses.  Rather Christ Jesus is, and he was, and he is coming.  He is the Son of Man who saves us and had ended and finished all the cheeses that we seek to please us.

And to one like a son of man is given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7:14 ESV)

The greatest temptation in this life is to be deceived into believing God’s Kingdom is not coming.  This leads one into false belief, despair, and other sins.  But God’s Kingdom has come to you.  God is giving you his Holy Spirit; he has and will continue to do so. So, by Jesus finishing sin on the cross we can live a godly life of confessing our evil, letting Jesus win the battle over the cheeses that please us.

Finally, I encourage you with these words written by Gloria and William Gaither.

Yet in my heart, the battle was still raging. Not all prisoners of war had come home. These were battlefields of my own making. I didn't know that the war had been won.

It is finished, the battle is over. It is finished, there'll be no more war. It is finished, the end of the conflict. It is finished and Jesus is Lord.

To that we can all praise God and say, “Amen”.

B, 2nd Last Sunday of Church Year, Proper 28 - Mark 13:1-2, Hebrews 10:11-28 "The Temple Body"

Mark 13:1-2 (ESV) And as Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!”  And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down. 

The temple in Jerusalem no longer exists.  In 70 AD the Romans levelled the place, due to a revolt by the Jews that began in 66 AD.

When Jesus was crucified, the curtain in the temple separating the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies was torn in two (Mark 15:38).  Christians recognise this as the time when the Old Covenant ceased to function along with the sacrificial requirements of the Law.  And along with the end of the sacrificial requirements was Jesus Christ’s one time victory over death and the devil; sin and Satan.

As we are told in the book of Hebrews, “‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.’  Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.” (Hebrews 10:17-18 ESV)

What the disciples didn’t know, Jesus was the new temple, replacing the temple at which they marvelled.  These mega stones and structures would be wrecked and razed in a mega-destruction.

So, here we have a picture of Jesus turning the attention of the disciples, from the temple, to him and his word of promise.

But it is interesting that this happens, since Jesus had overturned tables of trade in the temple (Mark 11:15-19). Through the parable of the Tenants, he revealed he was the stone the builders rejected (Mark 12:1-12)

He told the Pharisees and Herodians to render to Caesar what bears the image of Caesar and to God what bears the image of God (Mark 12:13-17). 

He told one of the Scribes, “love the Lord your God with all your soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:28-34).  

He taught in the temple, that the Christ was the Lord of David, even though he was the son of David (Mark 12:35-37). 

And just prior to the disciples being impressed by the size of the temple, Jesus highlights the wealth of the poverty struck widow, who put all she owned into the temple treasury, against the perception of the scribes’ greatness and the greater condemnation they would receive (Mark 12:38-44).  

All along Jesus was painting a picture of himself as the temple but despite this, they didn’t get it.  When Jesus told the Scribe in the temple, “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (Mark 12:34), no one realised he was speaking about himself. He was not talking about the temple, nor an abstract understanding of the kingdom of God.

Jesus is the temple of God.  He is the Curtain of Creation through which we enter the presence of God, encouraged by the Holy Spirit to receive his blessing. 

“We have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus,  by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh,  and since we have a great priest over the house of God,  let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.  Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.” (Hebrews 10:19-23) 

Jesus paints this picture.  The disciples don’t get it. It is interesting but we shouldn’t be surprised!  Why?  Because we too struggle to see Jesus as the singular curtain through which we are led into eternal life!  And we have a much better understanding of this picture because Jesus has completed the picture. Jesus waits for our response, now that he has been raised and ascended into heaven; the Holy Spirit has been sent; and the temple now no longer stands in Jerusalem.

Yet we find the confession of our hope in the church is being sorely tested at the moment.  As a community of faith and as individuals, hope appears to be suffering. Because our hope suffers, confession of our hope is next to non-existent.  But where a confession of hope does exist, it’s a wavering hope, darkened with deadly doubt and blended beliefs.

Rather than a confidence in Jesus’ return and restoration, one hopelessly doubts saying, “I hope Jesus returns!” 

What is going on in the core of our being when this happens?

Like the disciples invested interest in the wonderful temple, we too have invested in many other temples.  Like the temple in Jerusalem all these other temples will end in decay and be devoted to destruction.  Although our temples of worship, unlike the temple in Jerusalem, have never served any function in the salvation of humanity.  Rather, they do quite the opposite, and erode faith, hope, and love, breeding self-righteousness and arrogance, hopelessness and despair, looseness and unappeasable desires.

Social media, advertising, individualism and the pursuit of pleasure have had a subtle effect on us all.  But there is nothing subtle about what our indoctrination in these things is doing to us as a society.  The temples are taking our time and they are taking our souls.  Such are the temple towns in which our hearts are deceptively drawn to in wonder, but end in disappointment, dissolution and destruction.

Unlike the temples that licence us for licentiousness, misery, and deathly desire, Jesus is the temple of truth, and he is faithful in his deliverance from death.

Unlike the temple in Jerusalem and the temples of our heart that end in death, he is the temple that begins in death and ends in life.  Where disfunction caused the death of the temple in Jerusalem and where the decay of our bodies will end in death, Jesus is the temple that begins in death that restores faith to live, hope to die, and love to forgive. 

One might ask why God would have Moses receive and institute the Law, with the temple  requirements, that would become dysfunctional?  All the Law seemed to do was breed works righteousness rather than love and faith in God who made the temple his footstool on earth!

And despite Jesus being the new temple that was destroyed and raised in three days (John 2:19), we still struggle with unbelief, despair, and our desires to be divine in our temples of goodness. And so one might also ask, “Has Christianity become just as dysfunctional as the temple at Jerusalem?”

What is God doing?

He is waiting!

When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,  waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet.  For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. (Hebrews 10:12-14 ESV)

Jesus is waiting for that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet!  In other words, he is teaching us and testing us.  Our Heavenly Father is teaching us, Jesus is the only Curtain through which we have access to him, and through testing us, his desire is that we learn from our weakness and failures and seek him, rather than rejecting his help and becoming his enemies.

Saint Paul puts it best, “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.  For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling,  if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked.  For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.  He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.” (2 Corinthians 5:1–5 ESV)

It is God’s will that the temple of our body will be swallowed up by life, the temple of Jesus, where faith, hope and love dwell.

In addition to this we can marvel at the wonderful work of the Holy Spirit who comes to us in baptism and brings us into Jesus as a community, by planting Jesus in each of us individually at baptism. This is God’s guarantee!

John realised the greatness of this guarantee and records it in his Gospel, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14 ESV)

His dwelling among us, is Jesus making us his temple community in which he tents or tabernacles. This is where our Immanuel indwells. Doesn’t Jesus say, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” (Matthew 18:20 ESV)

So, since we have God’s promise, his faithfulness, the certainty of hope of life through death, and Jesus’ love from the cross through our baptism.  “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love (to forgive) and good works (confessing God’s good works of forgiveness and our good confession of sins),  not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, by confessing your sins to one another, and praying for one another, that all of you may be healed, and all the more as all of you see the Day drawing near.” (Hebrews 10:24–25, James 5:16)

Amen.

Warrnambool Lutheran Parish Pastor Heath Pukallus Installation Service 2pm (Victorian Daylight Saving Time) November 7 2021