FOUNDATIONS FOR PEACE

June 20-22, 2008
Matthew 10:34-42
Pastor Tim Smith
6th Weekend after Pentecost

Matthew 10:34-42
34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn ”‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— 36 a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’
37 “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 38 and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
40 “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives the one who sent me. 41 Anyone who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and anyone who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward. 42 And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.” (NIV)

Point 1. Jesus came into the world to turn people from their own families.
Point 2. Anyone who does turn to Jesus is unworthy of him.
Point 3. Whoever loses his life for Jesus’ sake will find it.
Point 4. Receive prophet, get prophet’s reward. Cold Water faith.

I’ve been writing devotions on the book of Isaiah for almost a year now for our God’s Word for You e-mail series, and a little while ago one of our readers asked me, “Why does Isaiah spend so much time talking about idolatry?” And that’s a valid question. Reading Isaiah, you’d think there were practically no other sins the people were committing except sins against the First Commandment.

But if we could just get the First Commandment right, we would be a long way toward the leading the kind of lives God wants from us. And you and I may well feel some guilt or quite a bit of guilt about this, and the guilt is something God wants us to know about. God’s law crushes us under the guilt of our sins. But don’t go all the way into despair. The law that crushes us does not tell us anything about our Savior or what he has done for us, and that’s what God wants us to know most of all. That’s part of Jesus’ point in our Gospel lesson for today.

Here before us is A COOL DRINK OF WATER FROM OUR LORD.

In the very last verse of our text, Jesus mentions a cup of cold water. Think about the different ways you might offer cold water to someone you care about. I’m going to compare the four main points Jesus makes to four different ways you might give cold water to a friend or a loved one. And we’re going to start with a wake up call. Jesus tosses a glass of water into our faces to wake us up, sober us up, and get our attention.

He says, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Didn’t Jesus come to bring peace on earth? Yes—peace between God and men. Between God and you. But that isn’t the kind of peace the world likes to hear about or wants to hear about, and so the world is going to hate you. The world already hates you. And that hatred is never going to go away.

Precisely because Jesus brought us peace, he also brought us trouble, and even war, from the world.

The world hates Christians for many reasons. And they may dump some reasonable-sounding arguments on top, things like: “Christians are hypocrites because they talk about forgiveness but they don’t forgive. They talk about righteousness and they’re all sinners. They talk about peace and brotherhood but then they tell me that my uncle can’t take communion with them.”

Those things will always be true. We are hypocrites. We are sinners—we’re born sinful and we live and die sinful human lives. And as for Close Communion, that’s something the Christian Church has always done, not as a tradition, but following the word of God itself.

And it’s because we do take the word of God seriously that we’re going to be hated by the world. And that will sometimes mean that our family relationships will be damaged, as Jesus quotes from Micah chapter 7, “a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”

But we don’t abandon Jesus just because following and loving him will get us unto hot water tomorrow. And that hot water we find ourselves in may turn into a full-scale fire burning out of control in our lives as relationships and career and home and everything else comes crashing down in flames—partly because the world hates God and hates us, but also because our own sins.

Next, Jesus tosses cold water onto sinful flames to put out the fire burning in our lives.

The Lord is doing nothing less than turning us back into the First Commandment when he says, if I may summarize his words, “Anyone who loves anyone more than me is not worthy of me.” Just as the prophets warn against idolatry in the Old Testament, we have the same warnings in the New.

And it is easiest of all for us to love ourselves most of all. We think we need to give in to our passions, to our whims, to our ideas of what we deserve or what we have coming, and when we do that, we set God aside.

And then, he tells us, we are unworthy of him. What a thing to be told. That sentence should make every one of us feel like Peter in the palace garden with our curses still echoing in the air as Jesus walks past and gives us that look. When we put ourselves ahead of him, we’re shoving him out of our lives.

Now, as we think about that sin, that sin we’re all guilty of, the heat is getting turned up.

And now let’s turn over to a splash of water not mentioned here in our text. Because the water of baptism douses the flames of our guilt and breaks the fever of our sinfulness. The forgiveness God has already given to us through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is the cure for every one of our sins. There is no other remedy we need to find. There is not sin any one of us has committed that isn’t covered over by Jesus’ blood on the cross.

You are forgiven just as surely as the sun rose this morning and the sun will set again tonight. You are forgiven and Jesus has sealed it and proved it by rising from the dead, the first one of all of us, so that we know that because of his forgiveness, we will rise from the dead, too, on the last day, not to eternal punishment but to eternal life and joy. And because of his forgiveness we can close our eyes in sleep every night with peace in our hearts because the peace that nobody could have ever given to us has been given by God himself.

And yet I know that we live in the world in the mean-time. And troubled days will come. But look, next, Jesus soaks a cloth in cool water to soothe our heads in our hour of darkest need. When someone is suffering from a fever, whether a little child or an adult, one of the first remedies to lower than fever is a cool washcloth.

Jesus knows that there may be times when we are so hated by the world that we may lose something because of it. We might lose a friend. We might lose a promotion or a job. We might lose some of our rights as citizens of our nation. We can quickly lose the respect of people who know us, simply because we trust Jesus as our Lord and because we trust the Bible as the true Word of God. We can lose the friendship even of other Christians because we confess that the water of baptism washes away all sins, as the Bible says, or because we maintain that what we eat and drink in the Sacrament is truly the body and the blood of Jesus himself, given or us on the cross for our forgiveness.

And there may come a time when we might be in danger of losing even more than friends and acquaintances because of our faith. And even beyond that, even when we simply suffer, not just because of our faith but because somebody else is just sinning and it affects us, Jesus knows about that pain, and to help the burning of the loss and the fever of the trouble in our loves, he soothes us with these words: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Lastly, Jesus Offers us a cool drink of water by telling us that God sees what we do, and God knows why we do it.

Jesus takes us into three scenes of people receiving or being hospitable to people. In each case, the reason we might receive this person is the same—it’s because they have faith in Jesus, too.

If we might receive a prophet just because he is a prophet, then we are acknowledging that this person is a true prophet of God, that this person proclaims the word of God and is a faithful messenger of God. If, for that reason, we receive him, then Jesus says “we will receive a prophet’s reward.”

Is a prophet’s reward—and let’s think here in terms of a reward in heaven—is a prophet’s reward any different from any other believer? The Bible doesn’t give us a specific shopping list about different levels or degrees of heaven, but there are times, and this might be one of them, where we might be lied to understand that the reward some will receive in heaven might be even more blessed and beautiful than the reward that most of us ordinary Christians will receive.

And so Jesus continues about a person who receives a righteous man because he is righteous—and why else is anyone righteous, and how else could anyone be righteous, apart from the righteousness—the rightness—given to us through the work of Jesus? And so here, too, a person is welcomed and treated well on account of his faith, which is not the way the world treats any of us.

And finally we come to our cup of cold water. In almost any culture, cold water is the first thing you might grab for anybody who is thirsty. It’s an unprepared drink; an it’s something you give on an impulse. And yet even when we give a child a drink on account of their faith, God sees what we do. And God takes our actions, done out of love, and to borrow language from Moses, “he credits those things to us as righteousness.”

So we see the different ways Jesus calls our attention to our lives, by a wake-up call, by quenching the flames of our sins, by the soothing message of the Gospel, and by the cold drink of knowing that God sees us when we respond to his love.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus. Amen

June 14-16, 2008
Matthew 10:24-33
5th Weekend after Pentecost
Pastor Don Sutton

Matthew 10:24-33
24) “A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. 25) It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household! 26) “So do not be afraid of them. There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. 27) What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. 28) Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29) Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. 30) And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31) So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. 32) “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. 33) But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.

Introduction
Some years ago an entertaining movie came out entitled “Straight Talk” starring Dolly Parton. It was about a dance instructor from Arkansas who moved to Chicago taking a job as a switchboard operator for a radio station. One day Parton inadvertently walked into a recording office where the manager mistook her fro a new radio therapist. He put her on the air. Parton actually completed a show before the producer discovered her true identity and fired her. However, listeners who had heard the one segment featuring Parton, began to call in requesting that she be put back on the air because they liked her straight-talking, no-nonsense approach to life’s problems. So the station hired her and featured as a real clinical therapist – Dr. Shirlee. Whether it’s Dr. Shirlee in a movie or a Dr. Laura or Dr. Phil in reality, there seems to be something about straight talk that makes people listen.

In today’s gospel reading, as Jesus prepares to send out his twelve disciples he talks straight talk to them and us about Christianity. Listen to what Jesus said (Read Matthew 10:24-33). So today we consider Jesus’ Straight-Talk About Christianity.

1. Expect Persecution
Some people think that Christianity is all air-conditioned churches, padded pews, promises of prosperity, preachers-on-demand, gourmet coffee, bakery donuts and sugar cookies.

What Christianity is all about is the truth that all people are part of the sinful human race. We enter life infected with sin and under the condemnation of God. David wrote, “I was born in sin and in sin did my mother conceive me (Ps. 51).” As Paul wrote, “As a result of one man’s trespass was condemnation for all men (Rom 5).” …Or, ”As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins …Like the rest we were by nature objects of wrath.” …” There is no one who does good, not even one (Rom 3).” Christianity tells us that because of our sinfulness we enter the world spiritually dead and eternally damned. Christianity tells us that even the bests we think, say, or do are not good enough for a holy God. “All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags (Is64).”…“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom 3).”

But Christianity, unique among all the religions of the world, reveals that God is not only a God of holiness and justice, but a God of mercy and peace. It reveals how God the Son left the glory of heaven and entered the human race to become our substitute and Savior. Christianity proclaims that Christ is our righteousness through whom we have righteousness with God. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5).” Christianity proclaims that
Christ died for us that we might have forgiveness and peace with God – “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ not counting men’s sins against them (2 Cor5).” Christianity promises that Christ rose again to assure us that there is forgiveness in full and life everlasting – “Jesus was handed over to death for our sins and raised to life for our justification (Rom4).” Christianity proclaims that simply through faith in Jesus as one’s Savior, one possesses this forgiveness and can look forward to eternal life.
Christianity is a source of life, peace, joy, strength and hope.

But in his straight-talk to his disciples Jesus emphasizes that Christianity causes conflict for Christians just as it caused conflict for Christ.

The gospels are filled with examples of the conflict Jesus encountered because of who he is, what he taught, and what he did. In John 5 there is the account of Jesus healing a lame man at the Pool of Bethesda. John records, “Because he was doing this on the Sabbath the Jews persecuted him. Jesus said, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day and I am working too.’ For this reason the Jews tried hard to kill him. Not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even call9ing God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”

Or according to Matthew 9 and 12 after Jesus had healed people of demon possession, Jesus’ enemies said that it was by the power of the prince of demons, Beelzebub, the devil himself, that Jesus drove out demons. These are but a few examples of the persecution that Jesus experienced at the hands of enemies.

In today’s gospel Jesus straightly emphasized that as he was persecuted, his disciples would also undergo persecution. He used three illustrations – “A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. 25) It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household!”

It’s pretty clear, isn’t it, that while connected with our church life there may be air-conditioned churches, padded pews, prosperity, preachers-on-demand, gourmet coffee, bakery donuts and sugar cookies, there will also be conflicts and persecutions with which we Christians must deal. Persecution may come when a Christian tries to help an elderly neighbor but unbelieving family members view such help with suspicion because they suspect the Christian has an ulterior motive – maybe material gain. Persecution may come in a university when a Christian is denied enrollment in a graduate program or achievement of an advanced degree because his or her Bible beliefs are in conflict with the philosophy of a professor or a department. Persecution may be on a team when a coach tells a player who wants to worship on a weekend that if he or she is not there on Sunday, they will not play again. Persecution may ensue when a Christian refuses to part-take of the immoral and ungodly that is highly popular. Persecution may be the sarcasm that ensues when a Christian states beliefs that others view as narrow and/or intolerant. In places like Iran Christians are threatened with death or loss of opportunity.

Jesus makes it clear, if you are a Christian, expect to encounter conflict and persecution. But as Jesus talked straight talk to his disciples he told them…

2. Don’t Be Afraid.
Jesus said, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Jesus was alluding to the fact that while those who persecute Christians may make life miserable and may even end our lives, they can’t take away the inner peace or the promise of eternal life that Christians enjoy through faith in Jesus. Jesus said, “Don’t fear those who persecute you.”
He also said, “If you’re going to fear someone and something, fear God. He’s the one who not only can kill the body, but can also kill the soul in hell.” Here Jesus is speaking to our sinful nature that at times may think, “Do I really need Christ as my Savior? Life would be more convenient if I didn’t need take time and make effort to feed my faith and just went with the flow.” Jesus is telling our sinful nature to get in line and to consider the consequences of having no Christ in our lives. Jesus also said, “Whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.”

But as for our new person, we have no reason to fear God. Through Jesus we have peace with God and enjoy not only the forgiveness of sins but also life everlasting.

Through faith in Jesus, we have the confidence that Jesus is acknowledging us before our Father in heaven. “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven.” It’s as if when Jesus allows us to go through times of persecution, he communicates with the Father saying, “While we’re letting this person be tested, we need to take care of him/her. He/she is one of ours. It brings to mind what Paul wrote to the Romans, “Christ Jesus, who died, more than that, was raised to life, is at the right hand of God and is interceding for us (Rom8).”

In his straight-talk about Christianity Jesus gives us another reason not to be afraid. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. 30) And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31) So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” I’ve read where people, especially the poor, ate sparrows in ancient times. Jesus said that two sparrows sold for a little money – an assarion or 1/16th of a denarius, a day’s wage for the common man in Jesus’ day. Yet, not one sparrow is shot or caught or dies without our Heavenly Father allowing it to happen.

Jesus’ point is that his disciples are worth much more than sparrows. We were created in God’s image. We were redeemed by God’s blood. We Christians are the Holy Spirit’s temple. We are chosen and precious to God. We re so important and God takes such an interest in us that, as Jesus indicates, God even knows the hair on our head. You and I do not even know that about ourselves.

God will let no harm come to us that does not fit in his plan or work for our good. When God allows trials in our lives, he is with us to bless us and keep us through these times. As Paul wrote, “Not anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom8).” That love comfort us. That love strengthens us. That love enables us to go on until God takes us from here to heaven. Amen.