Jesus says, “If you obey My commands, if you do the things I have taught you, you will remain in My love. Just as I have done the things My Father has taught Me.” So that’s it? Just get out there and imitate Jesus? Obey! Obey! Obey! No. We love one another, because that’s what Jesus has done. He has loved us, because that’s what the Father does. The Father loves His Son, who loves us, who love one another. It’s not an imitation of Jesus’ love. It is Jesus’ love. It’s God’s! It’s ours too. All together as one!
You see, that’s what the thought-clichés and pious platitudes about love fail to grasp. We cannot love one another unless we remain in Jesus’ love. We cannot bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things unless we remain in the love of Him who has done all things in the laying down of His life and taking it up again.
Every once in a while, you manage to see places that are all dried out. Places where the water doesn’t reach, places where nothing seems to grow, where dust, and death, and decay still seem to win out. Driving around this time of year, you have to really look for them, but they’re there. Along fences, or tucked in the back corners of a field. Places where the water just never quite seems to get, or places that have been worn down and packed hard by long use. Or in the old buildings, once so full of life and work, now empty, leaning, and lifeless.
The mystery of the Ascension is just that—it’s a mystery. It demands that we think what many people today think is almost unthinkable; that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum, nor is it speaking about a spiritual world as contrasted with a physical world. No! Time and eternity for God are flip sides of the same coin. Spiritual and physical are not two different worlds, but together confess a reality that no eye has fully seen nor mind has fully plumbed!
LCMS World Relief and Human Care is already at work helping the people of Joplin. From their blog:
Jackie Duncan was recovering from brain surgery when a killer tornado ripped through St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Joplin, Mo. The storm’s force pulled Gary Duncan’s 76-year-old mother “down the hallway, with debris flying everywhere,” says the operations manager at KFUO Radio, an LCMS broadcast ministry.
“When I watched news about the tornado unfold on TV, I had tears in my eyes knowing that my mom was there,” …
As a father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife, or worker, have you been disobedient, unfaithful, or lazy? You have not loved me. Have you been hot-tempered, rude or quarrelsome? You have not loved me. Have you hurt someone by your words or deeds? You have not loved me. Have you stolen, been negligent, wasted anything, or done any harm? You have my commandments, and you have not kept them. You are not one who loves me.
May 2011 Newsletter
The May Newletter is online and you may read it here if you would like a headstart on the month of May instead of waiting for it to come in your mailbox.
The influence of the King James Bible is so great that the list of phrases from it that have slipped into our everyday speech, that have taken such deep root that we use them all the time without any awareness of their, is practically endless: sour grapes; fatted calf; salt of the earth; drop in a bucket; …
The St. Peter’s Choir performed their annual Holy Week cantata on Palm Sunday, April 17th. The work, How Great Thou Art, by David T. Clydesdale, is based on the Passion according to St. Matthew.
Part 1 includes: Let Heaven Ring, Hosanna, We Will Not Forget, He Won’t Forget Whose Child You Are
Part 2 includes: The Arrest, What Will You Do With Jesus, Let Him Be Crucified, Via Dolorosa
Part 3 includes: When They Pierced Your Side, How Great Thou Art, God So Loved the World
Easter is about God. It’s not about the resuscitation of a dead body. That was Lazarus, not Jesus. It’s the resurrection of the body. It’s not about the “immortality of the soul,” or of some divine spark that endures after we die. That’s Plato, not Jesus. It’s not “the spirit of the master carrying on” or “new beginnings” or “Jesus living forever in the hearts of those who love Him.” As if Jesus has passed on, crossed over, gone to a better place. None of that is Easter.
Easter is about God; the God who creates a way where there is no way. The God who makes war on evil until evil is undone. The God who swallows up death by death, who raises a very dead Jesus to very real new life just to show us who’s really in charge. You can’t explain that. You proclaim it.
Text: John 13:31 “When he [Judas] had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.”
The further we get into this Holy Week, the darker things seem to be getting. Both in our weather outside and the readings that have shaped our mornings together. Yesterday, we heard Christ warn that the Light would be in the world only a little while longer, that His disciples might guard themselves against the creeping darkness. In our reading today, Christ acknowledges that the darkness …
John 12:35-36 So Jesus said to them, “The Light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the Light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the Light, believe in the Light, that you may become sons of Light.”
Knowing Jesus Christ as the Light of the World changes everything; changes how we look at ourselves…changes how we look at the world.
If Jesus is indeed God in human flesh, then He is certainly the Light …
In the beginning of today’s Gospel Reading, the pieces are all there but they are scattered all over the place. By the end, in the overwhelming joy of Lazarus’ return from death, all the pieces are brought together around Jesus, who now must go on to Jerusalem and fulfill what He has made known in raising Lazarus from the dead, fulfilled in His own death and resurrection.
So we rejoice in how the pieces have come together for our 6 catechumens, at this point in their life as Christians. And we rejoice further to see, in Christ, how the good work which He has begun in them will be carried on to the fulfillment He intends for them.
