Sermon: The Silence and Absence of God in Esther 7

Our passage today is from the middle of the book of Esther. We have to talk a little bit about what makes this book unique before we go on to examine the particular passage we find ourselves in this morning. Esther is set in the period of the Exile—after the conquest of Jerusalem by foreign powers, and it is set among the people of the Exile—a people who have been banished from the land promised to their forefathers and to their decedents. It is set in a time between times—between judgment and punishment by God and the deliverance promised. Right now Esther and Mordecai are a part of a people vanquished and banished, one conquered people among many conquered peoples, scraping along by wit and guile for survival. It is a book that resounds with the silence and the absence of God, or so it appears, and it is filled with people that do not necessarily seem to have personal faith and devotion to Yahweh, the God of Israel, or the Law of Moses, or even Jewish identity. We don’t hear the name of God in this passage, we don’t hear any mention of the Law of Moses, and you won’t find either in the rest of the book either.

There’s something else odd about the way the characters act in this book. In other books of the Bible, the Biblical heroes are normally remarkable because of the ways in which God interacts with them. We remember Abraham because God first spoke the words of promise to him. We remember Moses because God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. We even remember a sneaky trickster like Jacob because God sent him dreams and answered his prayers and eventually transformed Jacob into someone you might actually like to meet. We even have other stories in the Bible that are set in the Exile in which the characters and heroes do all of the normal things (Daniel is one conspicuous example): other characters pray, they keep the Law of Moses, they hear from God, they do great deeds in the name and power of God. But not in Esther. In Esther, the characters fast, but they don’t pray, it is not certain whether Esther or Mordecai are interested in keeping the Law, and they certainly aren’t getting about the task of evangelizing Haman or King Xerxes or anyone else. Esther seems to have hidden her Jewish identity for most of the story, and would have gone on hiding it had not she been forced to reveal it for the sake of saving her people. The characters in this story don’t seem to do what they do for the glory and fame of God. The most religious thing a character does besides fast is cast lots, and that’s what Haman does in order to discover when he ought to begin exterminating the Jews. In the rest of the story, religious observance is inconspicuous if it is present at all. But this story is still about redemption, and our passage today is about the defeat of the enemy who is seeking to destroy all of the Jewish Exiles. Let’s get caught up on the action.

Esther 7 walks us into the climax of the action of the story. Esther 1 sets the scene for our story with the downfall of the previous queen, Queen Vashti, which paves the way for Esther to rise in the Persian Court. Esther 2 paints a pretty distressing picture of how Esther is chosen by the licentious Xerxes as queen and shows us just how little power Esther has had over her own life and her own fate. Esther 2 also tells us how Mordecai warns the King about an assassination plot against his life, and establishes Mordecai as an important figure at least temporarily in good graces with the king. Chapter 3 tells us about the rise of Haman the Egomaniac and how Mordecai slights him and Haman the Egomaniac decides a fitting punishment for Mordecai should be the destruction of all of Mordecai’s people. (By the way, the portrayals of Xerxes and Haman are preposterous and exaggerated on purpose—their evil is so evil, it’s absurd. Both of them are insanely greedy egomaniacs who have incredible amounts of power and seemingly very little discretion. Your reaction is supposed to be something like, “These are the people in power? Who put them in charge?) Chapter 3 also chronicles Haman tricking Xerxes into killing off the Jews—Haman doesn’t actually tell Xerxes it’s the Jews he’s killing and Xerxes seems perfectly willing and content to commit genocide just on the word of one trusted official. And Haman gets the king to pay him to do it. Chapter 4 is about Mordecai freaking out and rightly so, and his appeal to Queen Esther to intercede for the Jews. Esther initially refuses, saying she risks her own life in such an appeal and Mordecai responds with some of the most important words in the entire book: "Do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" Esther's response is also pretty awesome: “Hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”

The rest of the book until our passage chronicles Esther’s response to Mordecai’s words, and foreshadows Haman’s demise. She gathers her people together to fast, and then approaches the King. She spends what we might consider a really ridiculous amount of time buttering up King Xerxes to accept her petition—apparently she has no reason to expect benevolence from him, or to be able to appeal to his better nature. Xerxes doesn’t appear to have a hard time ordering the death of an entire group of people and Esther has to use wit, guile, and charm in order to maneuver Xerxes into favoring her over Haman.

Which brings us to our present passage. This is the second banquet that Esther has hosted for Xerxes and for Haman, and our scene finds Haman and Xerxes relaxing and drinking wine after the feast. Xerxes says to Esther for the second time, “What is your wish?” Xerxes said this to Esther at the feast on the day before, but Esther deferred her request, asking for a second banquet. Even now, she must wait until the end of the feast, until Xerxes turns to her and asks her what her wish and her request is. It is clear that Xerxes is the one with absolute power here. Esther knew she was taking her life into her own hands by going against the law to approach the king without being summoned. Now she does it again, knowing that Xerxes could banish or depose or even kill her for opposing Haman. She doesn’t bother to try approaching Haman at all, to try to wheedle a compromise of some sort from him. In Persia, she doesn’t have that kind of independent power.

The words that Esther uses to beg the king for her life and the life of her people are interesting. She speaks in terms of finding favor with the king, and she finally identifies herself with her people (though she doesn’t mention she’s a Jew, yet, that’s the next chapter), and identifies herself with her people when it means getting killed along with her people. She asks for her life and for her people and doesn’t allow herself to be parted from them, and doesn’t allow Xerxes the chance to only save Esther—she demands that he save her people as well. She also casts her presently unnamed enemy’s motives in economic terms—in terms of greed: “we have been sold to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” Haman’s a greedy would-be mass-murderer.

These three words are a constant refrain in Esther: the Jews are “to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” It is said this way and repeated so often I think for a couple of reasons: On one level, it’s a part of the exaggeration we see throughout the book. The villains are crazy villainous and the dramatic tension is epic—so why not turn up the hype? On another level, you can tease out distinctions between destruction, killing, and annihilation. “Destruction” in this context suggests something being violently ripped apart. If the decree of Haman goes forward, the Jews as a people—as a corporate body with corporate unity—will be destroyed. Probably not every single Jew will be killed—no doubt some will escape. But the Jewish identity will be destroyed and erased from the face of the earth. “Killing” is the most literal—Haman destroys the Jews by killing them all, not just destroying their capital city or their local places of worship, or enslaving them all or forbidding worship of the True God. Horrifically, he actually wants to kill them all. Finally, Haman’s purpose is annihilation. He doesn’t just want to kill a few Jewish troublemakers like he perceives Mordecai to be, he wants to completely and utterly destroy them and wipe them off the planet. Annihilation is an appropriately dramatic word for genocide, especially for a coolly calculated genocide such as this, which is motivated solely by Haman’s egomania. A normal person would have found a way to punish Mordecai alone—who resorts to genocide because of personal insult?

Almost surprisingly, Xerxes is moved by Esther’s plea. Partially this is true because he doesn’t really know that he is ultimately the one responsible for the decree. Esther has set it up such that the plight of the Jews is identified with her and has managed to get Xerxes enraged on her behalf. It is only then that Esther identifies Haman as the villain. It’s all over for Haman now. The rest of our reading and the rest of the book of Esther is about poetic justice. The plan that Haman devises for Mordecai falls on his own head, and the people who set out to destroy the Jews on the day that Haman appoints are actually destroyed by the Jews because Xerxes allows the Jews to arm and defend themselves. Genocide is averted and Purim is inaugurated to celebrate this kind of second Passover.

And what is it that we are supposed to learn from this peculiar story of deliverance, in which we see vividly evil and powerful characters at work and so much absence from God? First, God wants us to know that he works through history and he works for our good—for salvation and for redemption and for peace—whether or not we are aware of it. So God seems silent in Esther. Well. Take a look at the world. Take a look at secular history. Take a look at your own life. I am sure that there are gaps and moments or maybe even decades in your own life and in the life of the world in general when God seems conspicuously absent. It doesn’t seem like he’s speaking. It doesn’t seem like he’s around. It certainly doesn’t seem like he’s delivering. It seems as though the powers that be who are in control of the world are evil and clueless and who really knows what God is up to. I think there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time in God’s silence or apparent absence—and they don’t know why. Now, we happen to know that there is a reason for silence in the book of Esther because Esther and her people are in Exile—they have been thrown out of the Promised Land because of the sin and rebellion of the people just as Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Part of the reason that God is silent is because the people don’t listen and that lack of ability to hear and obey creates distance between us and God. In Esther we find ourselves with a heroine who may have some strength of character, but may not necessarily have any faith. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. Probably she doesn’t—books in the Bible like to mention faith if people have it.

Another reason why this story is good for us is because it tells a story of God’s faithfulness and God’s redemption of people who have been Exiled, who are religiously clueless and probably disobedient, and who don’t seem to deserve or warrant God’s use of them . . . even as, to a certain extent, they still remain in Exile. So often in Scripture we find heroes—like Abraham, for example-- that seem to “deserve” being used by God. That’s probably not a very good way of reading those stories, but biblical heroes are often remarkable and we oftentimes wish that at the very least, we had their connection to God. I don’t how you feel, but I don’t feel that way about Esther. Esther is basically a slave who is valued because Xerxes thinks she’s beautiful and thinks that he is in love with her. She’s stuck with a powerful man in the most powerful country on the planet, and that man is not a good man. She hides her identity and who knows what kind of freedom she has. Esther doesn’t seem to really know what’s she doing insofar as God is concerned. And at the end of the day, she delivers her people and is herself delivered, but she still doesn’t meet with God. Yuck. I don’t want anything to do with any of that. In many respects, she isn’t your typical role model, and her life is not enviable. But God still redeems her life. He takes someone who could have done absolutely nothing remarkable and made her a deliverer of the entire Jewish people. In that way, she is on par with the earlier Judges of Israel. She’s like Gideon or Sampson or Debrah. And that is completely characteristic of God. He takes our lives, and the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves, and turns what is simply unenviable and tragic into his vehicle for redemption. That is what God does—and you know what, he is always doing it for people who don’t deserve it and for people who don’t recognize that he is the one acting in their lives. And the weakness of Esther reminds us that we, too, are unable to save ourselves and must appeal to someone else with power—to Xerxes. We may think it unfortunate that Xerxes has the power he does, but it does serve to remind us that we don’t have enough power in ourselves to defeat the evil and brokenness in our own hearts and minds.

In many ways, I wonder if the story of Esther is for people who don’t recognize that the good that comes into their lives, the gifts they receive, whatever kind of redemption they receive, is really from God. God doesn’t sign every good thing he does, “Love, from Jesus.” But he does sign it, “Love.” Or “Grace.” or “Mercy.” Or, “Salvation.” As Christians, we know that God is the author of Love and Grace and Mercy and Salvation. Jewish theologians and later Christian theologians knew that God was the only redeemer, the only one who saved. If there was salvation, it was from God. That’s part of the reason we know Esther is a theological book—because it’s a story of redemption, and only God redeems, though he often uses human instruments, willing or unwilling, knowing or unknowing, to do so.

There’s one more element of the story that is important. And it is this element of the story that makes remembering why “believing that only God saves” crucially important. This last element of the story is the character Haman. Haman is the enemy, and in so many ways he is The Enemy, and yes, I mean, Haman is really a Satanic figure. Haman and Satan have a lot of things in common insofar as the Bible characterizes both people. Satan is always someone who is out to get human beings out of pride and malice. He is always accusing people or tempting people or deceiving people who have certainly done him no wrong—and he is always a force working for destruction, for killing, and for annihilation. For whatever the enemy’s reasons are, he wants to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate the people of God. He tricked Adam and Eve into something that actually got them killed and doomed the entire human race to the daily struggle with evil and brokenness and sin. While Haman’s powers are a little more constricted, he is little less malevolent. He only goes after the Jewish people (though the Jews are often representative of humanity in general in Scripture), but does so for senseless and malicious reasons. He wants to destroy all Jews because of a small slight to his pride, and he is only satisfied with their complete destruction. I think this serves as a warning to us on more than one level. After all, Haman’s evil notions aren’t unique—genocide is an old evil that people with too much power seem to employ all too readily. Esther does a good job of showing how absurd and truly insane Haman’s malice is. But why does Haman choose such disproportionately evil actions?

It’s because there is an enemy behind Haman and Hitler and all the other power-crazed psychopaths that keeps creeping back into the scene from every nook and cranny possible, and keeps coming back, time and again. If Haman were unique, Esther’s story would be a little happier than it is. But Haman’s story isn’t unique, and because his story isn’t unique, we know there’s something more going on. That something more is the spiritual kingdom of darkness that wars against God, against human beings, and especially targets the people of God to take them out—to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate.

And this is why Queen Esther is only a temporary deliverer, who is upheld by the Great Deliverer. This is why Mordecai can say to Esther, “For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place.” The Jews and human beings will always have a deliverer because God is present even when he appears to be absent. Esther just had the privilege of her life being redeemed to serve God’s purposes. There will always be salvation for the undeserving and for the weak, and we always have a defender.

And we know how this story plays out better than Queen Esther does. We can see the universal themes in Esther because we already know what Jesus did. We know from the New Testament that the real fight for the life of the world doesn’t ultimately concern things like murder and genocide and hatred—unfortunately, those horrible things are only symptoms of a condition that would have been utterly tragic had not God intervened at the source. We need someone who can intercede for us, who can fight that battle for us. Jesus, when he fights for us, wins the battle at the very root of the problem. He’s takes on all the powers of the world and all the spiritual powers behind those powers and shows them how he takes on humanity’s sin in the cross and defeats their punishment and defeats death in the Easter Resurrection. By mercy and grace and redemption and destroying death for us, Jesus humiliates the evil powers. Jesus destroys the real power that sin has, so he can start to loose the chains that enslave us to brokenness, to sin, to defeat, and to evil. But it’s only when you take on the real problem that you have real results. We can’t pretend that symptoms are causes. Esther is a small story that tells the same story as the big story, and reminds us not to fool ourselves about what’s really going on in human life. What’s going on with both the problem and power of evil and the deliverance and salvation of God is far more than immediately meets the eye.

Let’s take a moment to remember who we are and where we are. Father, we live in the midst of a broken world that you sent your Son Jesus to save. Jesus has completely his work and sent his Spirit to create a new people with whom you are very present and very active. But we still live in a time of Exile even though we know that time is coming to an end. Help us to remember who the real enemy is and who the real Deliverer is, and that because of what you have done for us in Jesus Christ, life triumphs over death.



Sources: I found two books of particular use and interest in crafting this sermon. The first is The Gospel in Esther by Michael Beckett . . . and I can’t quite find the second book, so I will update it when I do.

Acts 17--Paul at the Aeropagus

Pray with me please: Lord God, please give me the courage and faithfulness that I need to preach your word to your people.  Amen.

Our passage this morning begins in the middle of what is one of Paul’s most conspicuous missionary endeavors.  Paul is already in the middle of the Areopagus—in the middle of the conversational hub of the intellectual elite of the whole Roman Empire.  He’s in the jewel of academic learning of the whole Western World—in Athens, a city somewhat past the prime of its glory in Paul’s day, but still renown for learning, for philosophy and for culture.  And still today the city of Athens has meaning as being a fountain of Western civilization and culture.  Up to this point in the story, Paul has been exploring the city of Athens and talking with the different intellectual schools—we hear specifically that the Epicureans and the Stoics have mixed reactions to what Paul has to say.  But the Holy Spirit catches their attention—Paul interests them enough that they want to bring him to along to where the philosophers get together to talk shop.  And this talking shop is somewhere between respectable intellectual discourse and something like intellectual gossip and novelty.  Our narrator comments, "Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new."  So these are the leisured, intellectual elite who have time to sit at Starbucks for hours and pursue over the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.   I think we see here that Paul takes these folks seriously—clearly he is engaging with them on a deep level with the things they are interested in, and learns enough about them to speak their language well enough to get invited to where the real action happens at the Areopagus.  But he sees them for the human beings that they are and doesn’t take them too seriously—some of these folks are perhaps just as interested in intellectual novelty as they are in deep philosophical truth.

So, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, Paul begins his speech:  V 23-25 read, “For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.”  This is good stuff—we get to see how on earth a trained Jewish-Christian theologian appeals to 1^st century Greek philosophers!  This is definitely a cross-cultural experience and definitely an example of Paul understanding his audience well and speaking to them in ways they can understand.  So specifically in these first few verses, Paul is not appealing to the religious sensibilities of the average joe citizen of the Roman empire--the average Joe goes to the temple and offers sacrifices to appease the anger of the gods, or to ask for favor from the gods, or to discharge his civic duty through piety or prayers for the emperor or city or the state..  Your average joe probably does think of the gods dwelling in temples made by hand.  It may or may not have crossed his mind as to why a deity—a being of supernatural power—would need his food or his service in order to be provided for or taken care of.  But the philosophers—the types of people who are hanging out at the Areopagus—on Mars’ Hill--have talked about it and they aren’t satisfied with popular piety or the religious status quo of their day.  These folks that Paul is addressing here are dissenters—at least in part—from the traditional way of thinking about things.  They are the folks who are more inclined to believe in one god or to believe that there must be an essential unity behind the pantheon of gods in order for the world to hang together and make sense.  And plenty of them—like those in the schools of Aristotle and Plato have already decided that God really couldn’t be a type of being that needed things from human beings.  For these folks, God is not a being who is dependent on human affairs or even necessarily one who is involved in human affairs or cares very much about human worship.  So in Paul’s interactions with these folks—these folks who still pay some kind of lip service to polytheism and what Paul considers idolatry, he finds a point of connection with this questioning and dissenting element of Greek intellectual culture.  It is from there that he starts to tell them the story of the true God, the God of Israel whom these Greeks don't know at all but they have begun to worship, at least in part.

Notice what Paul does and how carefully he speaks to these men of Athens: "as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, [read—idols and altars to Greek and Roman gods and goddesses] I found also an altar with this inscription, to the unknown god."  First of all, Paul references an altar, but not an idol or a statue.  I wonder if it wasn’t an empty altar with no image but only this tantalizing and ambiguous inscription: to the unknown god.  Moreover, it is the very confession of ignorance on the part of whoever made this altar to the unknown god that makes it such a suitable point of contact for Paul.  Whoever decided that this altar should be there was in effect saying, there is Someone, something out there that we don't know about it, we cannot see, and we don't really understand, but we somehow know that this unknown Someone is worthy of our worship.  In other words, Paul interprets the very existence of this altar as a testimony to what he later talks about in Romans 1: “for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made."  By the sheer creation of the world there is enough information, enough of a trace of revelation, as Aquinas puts it, to know that someone has passed by, someone's creative hand is on the world.  But—and this is crucially important—there is not enough information to identity who this Someone is.  For that, you need something more--you need a story told to you by God himself about who he is, what he has done, and how he plans to draw all people to himself.  And this is exactly what Paul proceeds to do--he tells them the story about who God is.

The first element of this story in verse 24 reveals that God is the creator—he is the one who made the heavens and the earth—so he is Lord, master, ruler of heaven and earth, but he is also the one who made the human race and the one who reigns over history and time and has in his hand the rise and fall of the nations of the earth.  Paul proclaims a universal deity here—this God, unlike all the other gods, knows all the nations, has made every people, and knows their land and their history.  He isn’t a local deity—and the Greeks are used to this—he is not a god among gods.  Again, this is appealing to the philosopher’s understanding of the transcendent god.  They have a sense already--Paul did not have to create this discomfort for them--that there is something deficient among the multiplicity of gods each with their own territory, each with their own limited power that competes with the limited power of all the other gods.  No, this God Paul preaches--the one they don't know yet--is of an entirely different caliber.

            But notice what Paul does not do here.  He does not mention Israel.  He does not even mention the name of Jesus—which is quite unusual for the proclamation of the gospel story, you might think.  Eventually in his story he gets to the part where God has appointed one man (who we, the ones who have been reading the other 16 chapters of the story, already know is Jesus) to judge the world with righteousness—so there is some degree of particularity in this presentation of the gospel—it is certainly not a vague story about vague good news or general benevolence—it is still the story of the gospel about the man God has appointed to judge the world, Jesus Christ.  But Paul does not yet tell them the name of Jesus.  Why not?  Because these Athenians have not heard of Jesus before.  They are not familiar with the ins and outs of the Jewish religion, they don’t know the teaching of John the Baptist the way other Jews or God-fearers that Paul travels to in Acts does—they don’t know or rather they don’t yet believe in anything that would give them a context for understanding a story about the God of Israel, for understanding a story about Jesus.  The first need of these Athenians, then, is to be given a context for talking about and getting to know God, for coming to know who Jesus is.  And that’s exactly what Paul is doing when he tells this more general story of God’s involvement in the world and God’s authorship of history.  We are used to hearing the very specific tale of God’s involvement with Israel—with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—with promises of children and land and blessing.  But Paul knows that God’s very particular involvement with the people of Israel was always leading to salvation being brought to the nations.  The original promise to Abraham is “in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”  So the God who called Abraham and made Jesus the Son of David, Messiah of the Jews and Gentiles always meant to bring his good news and his salvation to this bunch of mostly Greek philosophers in Athens.

We know then—because Paul is telling us—that this God is the God of all human history.  So what is the purpose of the activity of this Creator God--this sovereign Lord of history? What is his purpose in making from one man every nation of the earth and appointing specific times and places for each people?  The purpose is for every one of those peoples and nations to“ seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him."  This I think is the hinge of Paul's message to the Athenians—it is the climactic moment of his introduction of the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And that is the invitation to seek and know the Creator of All.  It turns out that the "unknown God" worshiped by the Athenians is not satisfied with being worshiped as unknown--he wants to be known and he wants to be found.  In fact, that is the very reason why the human race was created--so that everyone might come to know the one who Created them.

The very next sentence is even more encouraging:  Not only does this unknown god want to be known, it turns out this God is actually close by—he isn’t that difficult to be known after all.  He isn’t far away from those philosophically minded Athenians and he is not far from us.  Paul says, "Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for 'in him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have said, 'for we are indeed his offspring.'"  So there are three incredible elements of gracious good news here!  (One) God wants us to know him and (two) it is not an impossible task!  It is not an epic quest requiring the exploits and adventures of a Greek hero or demigod.  God has already drawn near to us—and it turns out the only reason we exist at all is because we live and exist in him in some way.  God holds our life and our being in his hand, and what do you know, this is something the Greek poets already knew.  This is something they perceived truly about God even though they did not have the gift and advantage of the Scriptures.. . . .  The third bit of good news is the way in which God is close to us--"we are his offspring."  What does that mean?  It means that God isn’t completely alien to us.  We are like him.  We are his children.  There is affinity there.  He intends to know us as a father should know his child.  And here we do find a note of opposition to way the philosophers tended to think about god as remote and distant and untouchable and uninterested in the messy, inferior lives of human beings.  No, it turns out we are the very offspring of God, the deliberate and free creation of an act of love, and that ought to serve as the basis for us to begin to understand what God is like.

And this Paul does use to segue into a gentle rebuke about the idolatry he has seen in the city of Athens.  V29 says: "Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man."  In other words, Paul is saying, "I know you are used to thinking about things in this way, but really, you and I both know better.  If we are God's offspring, we really can't go on believing that these chunks of metal and stone have any significance whatsoever.  If God is God, then he is not the product of any imaginative art of human beings--nothing we make up can really capture his essence and likeness--this business of making idols really doesn't make any sense. You are philosophers—I know you know better than that, I know you are dissatisfied with all of this.”  Paul goes on to conclude his speech in v 31 with a most relevant piece of information: God is commanding people everywhere to repent because he is going to judge the world in righteousness, which means he is going to judge with righteous judgment—not the partial and incomplete justice that we now experience—with the real justice with which only God can judge.  God has been patient with the past chapters of history and with the religious ignorance of human beings, but now he's bringing things to a close.  The second half of v. 31 references Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.  It is as if Paul is saying to them: I know this day of judgment stuff sounds a little crazy, but God proved it to all of us by raising this man from the dead.  And resurrection from the dead of course implies all sorts of vitally important things: it implies Jesus’ victory over sin and death, and his victory over all the powers and principalities, and over all the systems of this world. 

This isn't a cheap gospel of cheap grace that Paul preaches.  It is good news because it is a genuine offer of salvation--it is a genuine call to people to know the living God, to move from death to life.  Paul doesn't avoid the subject of judgment, but he doesn't have to talk down to the Athenians or preach condemnation in order to do it.  Judgment is not bad news.  Judgment is good news because it means Jesus is going to set things right--he is going to right the wrongs of the world and see that the peace of his kingdom, the kingdom of God, is established in the world in the place of the violence and oppression of the nations of the earth.  You will only have a problem with judgment if you want to resist the peace of God or face God on your own terms.  Submit to God's kingdom and you will find that He is your father and you please him by your trust in his Son.  Here we see that Paul is able to be serious and not compromise the integrity of the gospel while still basking in God's kindness and love for the people gathered at the Areopagus.  These things are not in conflict.

The God Paul preaches here really is very kind in the way he deals with our ignorance.  Even though we learn earlier in this passage that Paul is grieved by the idolatry he sees in Athens, he doesn't scorn the people for their mistaken idol-worship.  Instead of laughing at the Athenians for being a bunch of superstitious nuts who even worship a god they don't know at all, Paul sees and perceives the deeper reality of the Athenians' fumbling after truth.  In true Socratic fashion, they know enough to admit their ignorance and the Holy Spirit works through this.  Paul's response is to commend them for what they have recognized--he fans that smoldering wick into flame rather than trying to quench it because it doesn't give off very much light.  Maybe it is no surprise that Paul is humble and winsome in his approach to the cluelessness of the Athenians because--after all, God was kind to him in his own ignorant persecution of the church!  Paul stoned Christians and persecuted the church of God and Jesus still went out of his way to reveal himself and to show mercy to this enemy of his, to call Paul to repentance, to reconcile him to himself.  In Romans 2:4 Paul tells us that it is the kindness of God that draws us all to repentance, and the whole story of Jesus shows us that God's glory is manifested in showing mercy to his enemies.  Paul knows this because he is one of the singular most obvious enemies of God whom God went out of his way to love and reconcile him to himself.  So I don't think it was very hard for Paul to be mindful of the Lord's kindness when he spoke to the Athenian intellectual elites--even the ones who mocked him and scorned him and disbelieved what he said.

In Paul's day, Athens was the intellectual center of the Roman world--Paul was speaking to the cultural and intellectual elite with the same graciousness and kindness and sincerity he showed to everyone else.   In our day, though--we sometimes get scared or intimidated—especially by the culturally or socially powerful—and we get either rigid or cowardly.  We start thinking that being scornful, condemning, critical and harsh of "the culture" is the way to do apologetics and evangelism --if only we condemn secularism enough--if only we tell people that they are godless and immoral or unethical enough--or that they are wrong and their ideas are bad--if only we bully them with our morality or tell them enough bad news, then surely they will convert and be on our side!  . . . Oftentimes we even mean well when we try this track—we are deeply concerned when we see these errors hurting people and we want people to know the truth.  The equal and opposite error is to preach a gospel that doesn’t confront or resist the world system at all, one that is devoid of the particularity of the good news of Christianity.  The first way will assure that no one will ever hear the good news of Jesus Christ as the good news that it truly is.  The other way will assure that no one hears anything at all.  The difficult thing is to be full of grace and truth as Jesus was and to make sure the gospel we preach is fully gracious and fully truthful. 

The middle way here rests on understanding that God himself wins people's hearts through his kindness and through sacrificial love not through condemnation, and that this requires real faith and courage to believe on our part.  God gives a genuine and sincere invitation to us and he isn't intimidated by our sin or the weakness and brokenness that marks human life and culture.  God will deal with our sin, and he doesn’t even have to bully us to do it.  God is not intimidated by American secularism or "godless pagan Europe" or the sin of any other nation or people in the world.  He deals very effectively with his enemies all the time and in Jesus he has a sufficient remedy for the sin of the whole world, and for every manifestation of that sin in that culture, whether it is among the intellectual elite or the poorest of the poor.  God is powerful and mighty to save, mighty to revive, to transform, to call to repentance, period, and we are called to have faith in that.  We have hope because we will never be in control of what God is up to in the world, but we do know that he is in the habit of raising the dead and turning the world upside down.  If he wants to make revival in this nation or China or call Europe back to himself, he will do it.   The nations are in his hand, they are his business.  But having a grasp on God's agenda for the nations is not our primary concern.  Our primary concern is having the courage and faith to peach actual good news to our neighbor and love him to the fullest and to the end. 

And what happens after Paul completes his telling of the gospel story?  More or less what happens to Paul in every city.  Some people believe the good news proclaimed, some laugh at the idea of the resurrection of the dead.  They don’t try to stone him or throw him out of the city—which are some of the more extreme responses to Paul—but normally only Paul’s own people do that, not the Gentiles.  There are a few commentators who believe that these last few verses are indicative of a mediocre response to the gospel, and this method of Paul's is "compromised" because he accommodated too much to the culture.  I don't think there's any textual support for that reading of this passage, and instead this passage is a triumph of evangelism and a model for us for how we can be faithful to the gospel no matter how little preparation we think our audience has for understanding God.  Again, our job is not to be in control of the gospel preached or worry about people’s response to it.  Our job is to be faithful to the good news and the good Lord that we have received and to do our best to pass along that story we live in and by with all the grace and truth we can muster, with God’s help. 

Father in heaven, we praise you for your kindness and goodness towards us and everything that you have made.  We pray you by the power of your Holy Spirit to enter into a deeper knowledge of you and your kindness towards us so we can preach the good news of your salvation and redemption to the ends of the earth, in every situation that we find ourselves, always having a word of grace and truth to offer to the people around us who do not yet know you and are in such desperate need of you.  In Jesus' name and for his sake, we pray.

Sermon on Genesis 17--Our Hope is in You

This is a sermon I wrote for Trinity Chapel.  It focuses on the place of election and hope particularly in Sarah's experiences in Genesis.  God takes notice of her and he takes notice of you.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Strength and my Redeemer.

Good morning.  I will be preaching on the Genesis 17 passage this morning.  Our readings from Genesis over the last few days have been concerned with Abraham, our first father in the faith.  In the first 11 chapters of Genesis we see the new Creation of God become subject to suffering, darkness and death because of the sin of human beings.  We see the human family plunged into tragedy after tragedy—starting with the story of Cain and Abel and culminating with the stories of the Flood and of the Tower at Babel—that great bastion of false religious dreams, aspirations, and human pride.  And in chapter 12 we come to the election of the family of Abram by God  . . . we see the beginning of God’s plan of redemption, we see the beginning of God’s self-revelation to Abram, his election of Abram and his family to be made a great nation, to be blessed and honored, to be God’s special people by covenant, and to be the people through whom all the families of the earth would be blessed eventually in Jesus Christ.  

  In the first half of chapter 17, our reading from yesterday, we find God confirming his covenant to Abram and assuring him that he is going to establish his covenant between himself and Abram’s descendants, to be the God of Abram’s descendants, and to give them the inheritance of the land of Canaan.  He also gives them the sign of his covenant, a sign in their own bodies, the covenant sign of circumcision.

And he does something else quite interesting and quite unexpected that is related to much of the narrative of our passage this morning: he changes Abram’s name to Abraham.  On the surface of things, it doesn’t look like a huge difference.  Abram means “exalted father” and Abraham means “father of a multitude”.  But here God is doing something relatively new.  He does something that he did not even do in the Garden of Eden.  And our reading today also begins with a naming or renaming.  This morning, we begin with Sarai who is renamed Sarah.  Both of these names mean princess, with Sarai apparently being an older version of the name.  God specifically calls Sarai by name, renames her Sarah, and tells Abraham that he has taken notice of Sarah and will bless her.  Consider the way that God takes notice of Sarah.  It reminds us of Hagar’s earlier encounter with God in which she insists that God has taken notice of her, “You are the one who sees me,” Hagar says to God.  By implication, the one who sees her when no one else has.

Sarah is an old woman now—a woman with no heir and no children—a woman who would have been considered a failure because of her inability to produce children for a great man like Abraham.  Does God abandon her in her distress?  Does he make his promises for Abraham only?  Or is he rather the God of blessing who seeks to bless all the nations of the earth?  God is the one who time and again chooses to work out his promises in one for the sake of many—here he starts with Abraham, but he sees Sarah, and he blesses her too.

God says, “I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her.  I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of people shall come from her.”  This is the first time that we see Sarah specifically included by name into the promises given to Abraham.  From the beginning of God’s word to Abraham, God Almighty had promised to give Abraham offspring—seed.  But here we see something that was not clear until now—that God had considered Sarah as well as Abraham and when he promised to give Abraham offspring, it turns out that he was choosing to fulfill his promises through Sarah. 

At first, Abraham doesn’t take this too well.  He falls down and he laughs—warring between belief and unbelief—asking if it is possible for people their age to conceive children.  Sarah, of course, will react in a similar way when she overhears the angels speaking to Abraham about the reconfirmation of God’s promises. Abraham protests, asking God that Ishmael be considered the child of promise.  God resists him.  “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son and you shall call his name Isaac.  I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.”  He names Isaac, too, perhaps a bit ironically and maybe a bit cheekily to remind Abraham and Sarah of their reaction to God’s promise, though I think this name, “he laughs,” also foreshadows the joy that Abraham and Sarah will have in Isaac.  God promises to bless Ishmael as well, and to make him a great nation: he speaks to Abraham in reassurance, much as he spoke to Hagar so many years before.  But he also firmly tells Abraham what his plans are, and they are to establish his covenant with Isaac, “whom Sarah shall bear to you at this time next year.”  This is God’s plan, not Abraham’s plan, and he has chosen to bless Sarah and her son, Isaac.

I am always struck when I read these passages in Genesis and see God initiating with Abraham and Sarah to give them what they most desire and what they think is least possible.  I also think it is interesting that we don’t really see Abraham and Sarah asking God for very much.  It is possible that they have spent much of their adult lives praying for children, but what we have recorded in Scripture is not their prayers and desires for children (though we see that in other cases in the Scriptures)—but rather God’s insistence that he will give them descendants beyond number.  There is one sense in which God sees them, and is responding to their need and providing them with an heir, but there is quite another sense in which he is also making up an entirely new plan of blessing for them which is good and bountiful blessing beyond their imagination—he not only gives them an heir, he gives them lines of kings and countries, and his blessing and favor and presence as an inheritance.  All this is above and beyond what they dreamed to ask for.  God is good.  He is their father (and ours) and they don’t even have to ask for all this because God sees them wants to give them every good thing—he wants to give them all the good things he has for them.

But he does it in such a peculiar way, and with such peculiar timing!  If God is so interested in the well-being of Abraham and Sarah—if he wants to be their God and wants to draw them into relationship with him and give them what he has, why does he wait so long to fulfill his promises to Abraham?  Why does God let Abraham and Sarah suffer those long years of doubt and privation of a child if he was just going to give them one in the end anyway?

First off, it seems pretty clear that God wanted to make his intervention preposterously and obviously divine.  The kind of intervention that apparently God’s chosen ones laugh at when it is first posed to them.  Both Abraham and Sarah laugh when they first hear that God wants to give them a son in their old age, when it is absolutely impossible and really very strange that they would have children.  It is a little wacky that God would choose for Sarah to conceive now, that he would choose to supernaturally give her the power to bear a child in her old age.  God fulfills his promises in such a way that his people understand that it is the power of God, not the contrivance of man that has fulfilled it.  This is God’s power and God’s wisdom operational, not the wisdom or power of the world.

In other words, God fulfills his promises in a way that includes his people’s getting to know him better.  That is always the aim of the promises of God, because the ultimate gift, the ultimate promise is God’s presence, God’s own self, Immanuel-God with us.  Abraham and Sarah don’t know it yet, but they are being schooled in the ways of God and schooled into knowing that he is the reward and blessing that they are truly seeking, and the thing they truly need.  God gives them a son—but gives them a son in order to create a people who might know him and out of which eventually will come the one man and the one Son who can put all things to right—everything that has gone wrong in the first 11 chapters of Genesis.  God does not bless us in order that we become so cozily content with this life that we forget things have gone wrong and we forget the purposes for which we are made.  We oftentimes forget or are skeptical of God’s desires to be kind to us, to be generous to us, to give us good things.  But on the flip side, we also imagine that when he does give us good things, he doesn’t mind that we are idolatrously preoccupied with them, when he really just wanted us to enjoy them and receive them as a gift from a loving Father.  So, he intervenes in our lives, with blessing and with discipline in order to show us the true life we are made for in Jesus Christ—to let us know that we are destined for something different and for something more than immediately meets the eye.

            This I think is the reason for the renaming.  Though God does choose the names of Isaac and Ishmael before they are born, he chooses to re-name Sarah and Abraham and clue them in on their lives being different and yet the same, and having both continuity and discontinuity with what they have lived previously.   He’s calling them out, calling them both to embrace a new life and a new identity with the God who gives what he has promised.  The naming of names is clearly important in the stories surrounding the birth of Jesus and John the Baptist and it is also clearly important in the book of Revelation, where Jesus makes several promises to the churches concerning names.  He promises to give new names to those who overcome, and he promises to actually write on those who overcome his own name.” (Rev 3:12b-13a)  Both of those junctures are junctures at which life has radically changed for the better because God is doing a new thing, bringing new life out of nothingness and out of death, which is something only God can do.

            The children of God are destined for great things because God has called us and blessed us and made us heirs with Christ and recipients of everything he has, blessing us with every spiritual blessing in Christ.  And he has told us to go, to share his blessings with all the nations in name of God.  It is my prayer for us today that we learn more about who God is and who he is calling us to be, that we walk more deeply into our new identity in Christ, that we recognize the love of the Father which is working in us to give us all good things by the power of the Holy Spirit.

            Father, we thank you that you have given us examples in your word that show us that you have called us to be your people and that you are our God.  Thank you for the lives of Abraham and Sarah and open our hearts to receive from you the fulfillment of your promises to them in Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for St. Michael's and All Angels

Longer version of a sermon preached at the chapel of Trinity School for Ministry on 9-29-2011



Sermon for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels


O LORD our Governor, how exalted is your Name in all the world, your majesty is praised above the heavens. Thank you for being mindful of us, for calling us into being in the beginning, and for sending your Son to be with us now and forevermore. Amen.

I am excited that today is the feast and celebration of St. Michael and All angels. Angels are an important part of the story and sacred history that we have received from God. We are told that they are present at all the important events of the history of salvation. They are present in the Garden of Eden in the beginning, and God speaks to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses through angels. Angels of course are present at Jesus’ birth, and they minister to him both after his temptation in the desert and during his long night of suffering in that other Garden, Gethsemenae. Angels participate fully in the mission of God in the church—they break apostles out of prison and bring messages to the disciples in order to get the gospel to go where it hasn’t gone before. Angels are absolutely everywhere in our story and they are intimately involved in the work of God to bring his salvation to pass to the whole earth.


But angels are so very mysterious. We don’t really know where they came from or where they are going to. What we do know for sure about the angels is that they are the preeminent servants and worshippers of God—that they see God and know God and love God not with the partiality or with the eyes of faith that we human being know and see and love God. No. They see him face to face, not in a mirror darkened with sin. They see him and they worship him and they are with him right now in a way that we will some day know for ourselves when Jesus comes again to raise us from the dead. They know his glory right now.


And the angels—the good ones anyway—are made of more noble stuff than we are—they are higher than we are, the Scriptures say— more powerful, more beautiful—in just about every way conceivable. Lancelot Andrewes notes in a sermon on Christmas Day, 1605 that “no long process will need to lay before you how far inferior our nature is to that of angels’ it is a comparison without comparison . . . they are in express terms said, both in the Old and New Testaments, to excel us in power; and as in power, so all the rest. This one thing may suffice to show the odds; that our nature, that we, when we are at our very highest perfection it is even thus expressed that we come near, or are therein like unto, or as an angel. Perfect beauty, as in St. Stephen, ‘they saw his face as the face of an angel. ‘Perfect wisdom in David, ‘my lord the king is wise, as an angel of God.’ Perfect eloquence in St. Paul, ‘though I speak with the tongues of men, nay of angels.’ All our excellency, our highest and most perfect estate, is but to be as they; therefore they above us far.” End quote.


But to what end and purpose? What is the point of celebrating the feast of St Michael and all the angels or what is the point of Lancelot Andrewes preaching a sermon about angels on Christmas day? You may have heard here at Trinity from more than one professor that the purpose of liturgy is catechesis, teaching, instruction. One of our professors here likes to call liturgy a ‘catechetical marinating process’. So in this case, in the case of the angels, in what are we being called to marinate? What does celebrating angels have to teach us about the nature of God and our salvation? David mentions them in his songs of praise to God, the book of Job speaks of them, and the author of Hebrews focuses on an extended comparison between Jesus and the angels for two whole chapters of the book. What we don’t know about angels far outweighs what we do know, so why engage the subject at all? What is the point?


What mentioning angels in all of these cases and throughout the Scriptures and the liturgy does for us is emphasize the mystery, majesty, wonder, and awe of the all-surpassing nature of the salvation that has been won for us in Christ Jesus. Angels are beyond us—we don’t know their history or origins, we can’t contemplate their nature because most of the time they are invisible to us, and we can’t stand in their presence without being overwhelmed and driven to the ground. And these are just angels—we are not talking about God here. If Lancelot Andrewes is right and angels excel us in just about every way possible to an untold degree, how much more does God excel the angels? For one, encounters with angels help us see and grasp just a little bit more of just how infinite the mystery of God really is. If just one angel appears to us a mysterious and miraculous thing—how much more is God himself above and beyond all that. This can help shake us out of thinking of God and treating God as if he were something small and containable and controllable simply because he is unseen and we forget. Angels remind us that the unseen packs quite a lot of firepower—far more than we can ever know right now.


The author of Hebrews is counting on the fact that we have some idea just how much firepower the unseen angels are packing. He’s counting on the fact that we can understand the angels to some degree and that his audience and we have some connection to what they have done and the kind of things they can do. And this is why the contrast between Jesus and the angels is so effective. Here goes the story: God’s own son takes on the nature of human beings—which Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2:7and 9 tell us is a little lower than the angels. This by itself is amazing. Jesus—God himself—doesn’t take on the nature of angels—arguably the “highest” sort of creatures in the cosmos, but rather takes on human nature—something a little more modest and humble. But something has happened since Jesus first became Incarnate in Bethlehem—something, the author of Hebrews tells us, has changed: “After making purification for sins, he—Jesus—sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.” In other words, Jesus’ obedient death on the cross, and everything that he accomplished with that and after that in his resurrection and ascension—particularly, his work in purification as we see in Hebrews 9 “For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, 26for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” All of these things that Christ has done—cleansing the holy places in heaven as well as the earth—won for himself a name and an inheritance that far eclipses any accomplishment or inheritance of the angels. Not even the angels could save the human race or purify everything that sin had polluted, just like in the book of Revelation no one is found on heaven or on earth or under the earth who is worthy to open the scroll or look into it. John weeps because no one is found worthy—no angel, no human being, except “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, who has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”


It is to this human and divine being that God says, “You are my son, this day have I begotten you.” And “I will be to him a father and he shall be to me a son,” and “let all God’s angels worship him.” Jesus is both God and man and he does something no angel can do—that only God can do—he saves. He saves and he will finish the work of redeeming the entire cosmos: “we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”


The angels also reveal something to us about the way in which God has ordered the cosmos, which is especially relevant to this chapter of Hebrews. The general point is that God has made all things good and that they all cohere and hang together in Christ. The particular way that the passage illustrates this is in the fact that it shows us how God has made the cosmos such that no one part of it lords over any other part of it. The angels who are mighty and powerful beyond our comprehension who “excel us far” as Lancelot Andrewes said, do not rule and do not lord over us. Instead, they are all “ministering spirits, sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation.” They help us. They protect us from harm. They do the work of servants unseen, unthanked, unappreciated and unnoticed for most of the time—and they do it for frail jars of clay such as ourselves. And you know what? They don’t seem to mind. In fact, the angels don’t even despise us in our sin—rather they rejoice over one sinner who repents. They are not like the elder brother in the parable of the Lost Son—they do not envy us the mercy of God, but rather long to look into the mystery of salvation.


What’s more, it doesn’t seem like they are ever going to rule over us. That’s not their destiny even though right now they have more glory than we do. And we aren’t going to rule over them either. The Scriptures have a couple of things to say about how the eschatological fate of human beings and angels seem to be conjoined. It seems that human beings have something to do with the judgment of evil angels—probably because they have been our enemies from the beginning—and the angels have something to do with gathering up the elect from the earth in the last times. Augustine saw the unity of angels and human beings as being deeply profound—the City of God is that perfect number of elect human beings and elect angels worshipping God together. But there is no concern with mastery or lordship here. Here, it seems that the higher exists to serve the lower and glories in that humble service. And of course we see how this all comes together in the person of Jesus and how Jesus exemplifies this most of all in that he did take on the humble nature of human beings. That he stoops to help us and that this is no embarrassment but rather the glory of God. The glory of God shines in the cross and in Jesus’ humility, and in the fact that he did not scorn us in all of our sin and our weakness, but rather gathers us up and takes us to the Father. Jesus is exalted because of that humble and humiliating service he has done for us.


When Jesus sat down at the right hand of Majesty, he inherited all things—the heavens, the earth, and everything in it. Chapter 2 of Hebrews tells us we will see everything put in subjection under his feet. And Paul tells us we are coheirs with Christ. Jesus has the name above every name, but he is giving the kingdom to us as well. We inherit the kingdom of heaven, the earth, we shall see God, we shall be called Children of God. The angels are for us a witness to all things in heaven and on earth. They show us how deep the miracle of Christ’s Incarnation is. They are an eschatological witness—they show us and remind us of how it will be when we see God face to face and when God brings all other kingdoms to their final end in his one kingdom: the kingdoms of the world are become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. They are a thousand radiant mysteries of God’s creation. But they all point to and they all look to Jesus and they help us see what kind of salvation we have inherited in him.


So, when you are doubting and distressed—and we will doubt and be distressed--and it seems like it is only you and God against all the powers of the world, the flesh, and the devil—take some time to remember the angels. Remember that there are thousands upon thousands of angels who are looking at the face of God right now, who see him in all his glory right now, and who are waiting at God’s command to aid you in the fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil which is the only true fight the Church has right now. And there’s something else, if this helps you: it helps me. It helps me to know that somewhere for some—the angels in this case--there is a really rich and deep and beautiful way that all is right with God. We struggle with sin and with death and every human being has this struggle. But no angel has—the angels that did not fall were perfect in their obedience and they have not sinned and they have never known separation from God and they have no need for redemption. And there’s millions of them. Alleluia, thanks be to God. There is no shadow of sin in all their being and all their life and for them, everything really is perfect with God, perfectly beautiful, perfectly wonderful, all the time. That’s a nice thought and something to look forward to and something to meditate on when things seem bleak here.


Lord Jesus Christ—we thank you that you became poor and suffered and died for us that we might be filled with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. We thank you for the ministry of your faithful angels who do not look down on us with contempt, but rejoice as we learn to follow you and know you as you are. We pray that the glory of God and of angels might be revealed to us today that we might know the height and depth and breadth of the salvation you have prepared for us from the foundation of the world. Grant these things through the power of your Holy Spirit and to the glory of God the Father. Amen.