"A New Thing" - Text:Isaiah 43:18, 19 (ESV)

“A NEW THING”
Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 13, 2016
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania

TEXT:
“Remember not the former things; nor consider the things of old.
Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not
perceive it?  I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the
desert.”

Isaiah 43:18, 19 (ESV)

    The philosopher George Santyana is credited with the statement:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
There’s a lot of truth in that.  I am convinced that a lot of the
problems that we face today, both in the Church and in society, stem
from the fact that a lot of people these days have absolutely no sense
of history.  They act as if nothing significant ever happened until
they arrived on the scene.  It is a good thing to look back at where
we have been so that we might be encouraged by past joys and successes
and so that we might learn from past mistakes and failures.  But so
many people go a lot farther than simply remembering the past; they
live in the past.  Some people have a particularly morbid habit of
dwelling on everything in their past that was bad.  I once knew a
woman who could recite--down to the minutest detail--all of the bad
things that had happened to her over the past thirty years.  What a
waste that is!  Think of all of the great dreams and positive ideas
that person could have come up with if only she had directed all of
that mental energy into visualizing good things in her future and
developing some goals for the remainder of her life.

    That is precisely what God is telling us to do in this morning’s Old
Testament Reading.  Speaking through the prophet Isaiah, the Lord says
that we should forget all of the old and dead things that clutter up
our minds.  He doesn’t literally mean that we should forget them
altogether, but rather that we should not dwell on the past.  He gives
us something better to dwell on, because in place of the old things of
the past He says that He is “doing a new thing” for us, which is far
more worthy of our interest and attention.  While the prophet does not
say specifically what this “new thing” is, to the Christian it is
obvious:  The “new thing” is the grace of God revealed in Jesus
Christ, in whom we are able to die to the past and live the New Life
that lies ahead of us through the power of Christ’s death and
resurrection.  Our theme for this morning’s message is a very simple
one:  God’s “new thing” is infinitely better than our old things.

    One of the biggest problems with the past is that it can cripple us.
When we dwell on the past, especially the not-so-pleasant things in
our past, those thoughts have a way of at first captivating us and
eventually enslaving us, making it impossible for us to break out of
our old bad habits and our old defeatist attitudes.  We can become so
absorbed in past disappointments and failures that we can’t see beyond
them.  This has happened to so many people personally and also in the
history of the Church.  The disciples of Jesus, for example, were very
excited about their New Life in Christ, but they still dwelled on
their past pride and jealousies enough to bicker with one another over
which of them was the greatest.  In a similar fashion, the early
Christians had their hearts in the right place when they boldly
confessed Christ in the face of persecution, but once they became an
institution with a favored status they reverted back to playing the
world’s old game of accumulating wealth and persecuting their enemies.

    On so many occasions the Lord has made it clear to us that if we
really want follow Him we have to make a clean break with our past.
Listen to what God said when He called Abraham:  “Go from your country
and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show
you” (Genesis 12:1).  Jesus said the same thing.  To a man who was
willing to follow Him but first had to go and bury his father, the
Savior said:  “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.  But as for you,
go and proclaim the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:60).  To another who
wanted to follow Him but first had to say goodbye to his family, Jesus
said:  “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for
the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62).  When it comes to being a disciple of
Jesus Christ, there can be no hesitation or divided loyalty, for He
calls us to forsake our past and to embrace and pursue His “new
thing.”

    The “new thing” that God calls us to gives us hope because it sets us
free from our past.  In Christ God has wiped away our past life of
sin, together with all of its failures and disappointments.  Because
of what our Savior has done for us in His life, death, and
resurrection, God accepts us as being righteous-- unscathed by our
past sins and shortcomings.  The time for feeling guilty over the past
is over and done with; it is now time for us to live the New Life that
is ours in Him.  If we continue to dwell on past sins and live in
those past sins, we are in fact denying and negating what Christ has
done for us.  Paul’s rhetorical question, addressed to the Roman
church, speaks loudly and pointedly.  The apostle asks:  “How can we
who died to sin still live in it? (Romans 6:2).  Elsewhere in his
writings he offers an alternative:  “If anyone is in Christ,” he
writes to the Philippians, “he is a new creation.  The old has passed
away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

    God’s “new thing” for us in Christ, given to us in the Sacrament of
Holy Baptism, is a new and glorious future, beginning at our Baptism
and lasting throughout our lifetime and even beyond the grave into
everlasting life.  Because Jesus was willing to be made like us, we
are able to be remade like Him.  So glorious is our future hope in Him
that we should have no need to even think about our past
disappointments, nor even of any unpleasantness in the present, as
Paul experienced himself when he wrote:  “I consider that the
sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory
that will be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).  There is so much good for
us to enjoy both now and in the future because of God’s “new thing” in
Christ that it overshadows all of the negative things in our past and
present.  Like “a light shining in a dark place” (2 Peter 1:19 NIV),
our future hope in Christ dispels all the darkness of whatever
failures and sorrows we have endured so far.

    As we look back on the past we find many things--a “mixed bag,” as
they say: high points and low points, joys and sorrows, good times and
bad times, virtues and sins.  But no matter what may be included  in
your past, one thing is abundantly clear:  You can’t change it.  For
good or ill, it’s there--and it is what it is.  But your Savior Jesus
Christ has changed how you live from this point on.  God has wiped
away your past sins and shortcomings by doing “a new thing” for you in
His Son Jesus Christ, and as a result He calls you by His Holy Spirit
to live a New Life to His glory, telling others, in word and deed,
about His “new thing” and about His call, so that more of those for
whom He suffered and died might know it, believe it, and be made new
by it.  His Spirit, working through the Gospel, motivates and
strengthens us for this and even forgives us when we fail.  More than
that, He makes sure that our calling is fulfilled in us, making up for
what is lacking in us, so that we need not worry, be afraid, or be
held back but may move forward confidently in His power and grace.

Amen.

May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood,
making us kings and priests before His God and Father, lead you to a
life of repentance and trust.  May He also be glorified in the lives
of you, His people.  He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.
Amen.

“SCENES OF HIS SUFFERING: THE PRAETORIUM” - Text: Mark 15:16 (ESV)

“SCENES OF HIS SUFFERING: THE PRAETORIUM”
Midweek Lenten Worship IV
March 9, 2016
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania

TEXT:
The soldiers led [Jesus] away inside the palace (that is, the
governor’s headquarters) and they called together the whole battalion.

Mark 15:16 (ESV)

    A cruel bunch, these Roman soldiers were.  We read about their
atrocities everywhere they marched.  The way that they treated Jesus
was really nothing unusual for them--that’s the way they treated
everyone except their own citizens, who were protected from them by
Roman law.  This particular Prisoner, Jesus of Nazareth, must have
provided a pretty good target for their degradation, since the charge
against Him was that He claimed to be the King of the Jews.  A claim
like that moved these Roman patriots to defend their emperor by
showing this Jesus just what they thought of His claim.  The robe of
royal color and the crown made not of gold but of thorns and a swamp
reed for a scepter were the props that they used to mock the Lord of
Glory.  Why did they do it?  They wanted to do more here than merely
cause their Prisoner physical pain.  Actually their mockery was
twofold:  They mocked His dignity as a Man and they mocked His
lordship as King.

    Jesus’ dignity as a Man was no doubt under attack in that Roman
“governor’s headquarters,” known to them as the praetorium.  No human
being ought to be treated the way that Jesus was treated there.  The
soldiers’ mistreatment of the Nazarene betrayed their contempt for
both Him and His people.  After all, they thought, He was only a
foreign subject of Rome--and a Jew at that.  It wasn’t as though He
were a full-fledged person like the Romans were.  I suppose it would
have been bad enough if they had merely refused to treat Jesus as Lord
and King, but they refused to treat Him even as a fellow human being.

    That kind of human degradation exists in modern times also.  No doubt
there are some still living among us who are old enough to remember
the atrocities of World War II, particularly the mass destruction of
European Jews.  And even we didn’t live through it ourselves, we’ve
certainly heard and read about it.  Or, if we want to be more current,
we are aware of the countless human lives in our own land that are
systematically (and legally) destroyed each day even before they have
the chance to take their first breath.  Incredible as it may sound,
there are some people in this advanced and sophisticated twenty-first
century who have no more respect for human dignity than that band of
soldiers who gathered around Jesus did.  What do European Jews and
aborted babies have to do with the mockery of our Savior?  Precisely
this:  These actions are present-day attacks on Jesus’ dignity as a
Man:  “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My
brethren,” He will say on judgment day, “you did it to Me” (Matthew
25:40 NKJV).  Because God became a Human Being in Jesus Christ, He
shares an identity with every other human being, however humble.  When
the human dignity of any person is attacked, the human dignity of
Christ is attacked.

    But the Roman battalion in the praetorium went even farther than
that.  They also attacked Jesus’ lordship.  This is obvious from the
way that they reacted to Him and the charges that were made against
Him.  In mockery they put on all the appearances of reverencing Him as
king.  The acts of putting a crown on a man’s head and dressing him in
“royal” garb and kneeling before him and acclaiming him as king are
normally indications of the greatest honor and respect, but here they
are performed in mock fashion for no other reason than to make light
of who this Man was said to be.

    The attack on Jesus’ lordship, like the attack on His human dignity,
still goes on in our world today.  Hypocrisy abounds everywhere.
There are many who pay lip-service to Jesus as their Savior, but in
reality they’re trusting in their own resources to get them through
life and in their own merits to justify them on the day of judgment.
With their lips they hail Jesus Christ as their Lord and King, but in
reality they no more let Jesus rule their lives than the soldiers let
Him rule theirs.  They may not literally spit in His face, but some of
their attitudes and actions are every bit as much of an insult to His
lordship.  The truth of the matter is that Jesus is the Savior, the
Lord, the King--and as such He is worthy of not just the appearance of
reverence and worship, but of total submission to His will.

    What were the real motivations that lay behind the activities of
those soldiers and, for that matter, what are the real motivations
that lay behind the attacks on Jesus’ dignity and lordship today?  Is
it sadism?  Patriotism?  Prejudice?  No one really knows and, to be
honest with you, it doesn’t really matter.  It doesn’t even matter who
the individuals are who are staging these attacks.  It doesn’t matter
because all of us are guilty. Every last one of us is responsible.
This mocked Man--this mocked Lord--is suffering much more than mere
human injustice and hatred.  He is suffering the just reward for
sin--your sin and mine.  Whether or not we personally have mocked the
dignity of our fellow man or have made a mockery of Jesus’ lordship by
hypocrisy, we are all alike sinners--sinners who have earned the kind
of agony and degradation that our Savior is enduring in the text
before us.

    But the power and grace of God comes through for us, even in the
midst of injustice and degradation.  As He often does, God takes our
evil and uses it for our good.  He takes the mockery of humans and
uses it to punish human sin.  He takes crucifixion, arguably the
cruelest method of torture that man has ever devised, and uses it as
the means of man’s justification.  Listen to what Isaiah, writing some
eight hundred years before Jesus was born, said about the promised
Savior who was to come:  “He was wounded for our transgressions, He
was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that
brought us peace, and with His stripes we are healed. All we like
sheep have gone astray; we have turned--every one--to his own way; and
the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5, 6).
The treatment that Jesus received in that praetorium and on the cross
brought us healing because He endured it in our place.

    This healing that Christ gained for us by His suffering and death is
total and complete.  It means that we no longer stand condemned before
God, because He has taken our guilt upon Himself.  It means that we
are no longer lost, wandering about aimlessly in the darkness of sin.
And it means even more than that.  What He did in that praetorium and
what He did on the cross was to restore us as creatures of God to our
original perfect state--the perfect state that humankind enjoyed at
creation but has been constantly corrupting ever since its first
generation.  Our life as Christians is really a march toward
perfection--a process of daily being conformed to the image of Christ.
This march is possible only because of the power of Christ’s death and
resurrection.  It is true that we will never reach perfection in this
life, but that goal lies before us in heaven, and He promises to bring
our march to completion there, where, by His grace we will live with
Him forever and praise Him not in mockery, but sincerely, as King of
kings and Lord of lords.

Amen.

May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood,
making us kings and priests before His God and Father, lead you to a
life of repentance and trust.  May He also be glorified in the lives
of you, His people.  He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.
Amen.

"Blessed" - Text:Psalm 32:1,2

“BLESSED”
Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 6, 2016
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania

TEXT:
Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sin is
covered.  Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

Psalm 32:1, 2 (ESV)

    When you think about someone you know who you would describe as being
“blessed,” what is it about that person that makes you think of him or
her in that way?  Is it because they are relatively wealthy and have a
lot of the comforts of life that ordinary folks like you and I have to
do without?  No, if we were to say that I think that we would come
across as being a bit too materialistic and greedy.  Do you judge how
“blessed” a person is on the basis of how loving and loyal that
person’s family and friends are?  I suppose that could be a
possibility.  Or perhaps you would consider a person to be “blessed”
if he or she has a lot of talent and is willing to share all of that
talent with the world in general and particularly with people nearby
who are in need.  When you get right down to it, I guess we each have
our own unique standards by which we measure a person’s “blessedness.”

    In Psalm 32 King David presents to us an entirely different way of
looking at blessings.  Writing under the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit, he tells us that the greatest blessing that can come to a
person is the forgiveness of his or her sins.  I’m sure that that’s a
big joke to most people in our day and age.  I say that because it
seems to me that the majority of people in our day don’t even
recognize sin as something that’s real, so how could they possibly
have any interest in or appreciation for the forgiveness of sins?  So
that we might be able to grasp more fully what David is telling us in
these verses, let’s spend a few minutes this morning focusing on what
they have to say to us about the greatness of our sin and about the
even greater love of God that He has revealed to us in His Son Jesus
Christ.

    To say that our sin is great is so much of an understatement as to be
almost laughable.  We don’t often think of ourselves as being very
sinful because more often than not we examine ourselves in comparison
to other people and on that basis we conclude that we’re not quite as
bad as a lot of them are.  Even if that were true (which is certainly
debatable) it’s not the right comparison to make.  If we really want
to honestly examine ourselves with an eye for our sin, we need to
compare ourselves to the perfect Law of God and the perfect example of
Jesus Christ.  That will give us a true picture of just how sinful we
are. You see,  God does not “grade on a curve,” so to speak.  Neither
is He impressed with percentages--the ratio of our good deeds over
against our sins.   Since He is a God of perfect justice, His standard
is perfection, and anything short of that is failure.  And not a
single one of us is able to meet that standard.  “There is no
distinction,” God’s Word tells us, “for all have sinned and fall short
of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22, 23).  No matter what the current
mode of thought in our world might be, sin is real.  It is a deadly
disease that has infected each and every one of us, and we display its
symptoms every day of our lives.

    How serious is our sin?  I’m afraid that this is something else that
the majority of our contemporaries fail to grasp.  Most people these
days, if they acknowledge it at all, consider sin to be a relatively
harmless thing--nothing more than good material for sitcoms. I would
imagine that it is desirable for people to keep laughing at it,
because that’s the only way that they can protect themselves from
seeing the ugly reality of their sin.  The truth is that the harsh
consequences of sin are all around us every day.  Every time that you
see a funeral procession or ride past a cemetery, you are looking at
the consequences of sin.  Every time that you witness illness or
injury or conflict or guilt (or experience these things yourself), you
are looking at the consequences of sin.  Whenever and wherever people
are hurting or troubled in any way, they are experiencing the
consequences of sin, because everything that is less than perfect in
this broken world of ours is there as a result of human sin.  It all
goes back to our very first parents, as Paul writes in his letter to
the Church at Rome:  “Sin came into the world through one man, and
death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned”
(Romans 5:12).  Once sin was introduced into the perfect world that
God created, that world was changed forever--and not for the good
either.

    But there is Good News in the face of all of this.  God’s Good News
for us is that no matter how strong our sin is and no matter how
terrible its consequences may be, His love for us is even stronger.
The blessings that we receive as a result of the love that He has
shown toward us in the life and ministry of His Son are even more
powerful than our sin and its consequences.  In the text before us the
psalmist tells us that the “blessed” man is the one “whose
transgressions are forgiven.”  But because our world doesn’t recognize
sin, it can’t recognize forgiveness either.  It prefers to deal with
guilt by explaining it away or deflecting it elsewhere or excusing it
or dulling the sinner’s senses to the reality of sin.  But God doesn’t
do any of those things.  Instead, He deals with the source of our
guilt once and for all and He lays it to rest forever.  Guilt that is
ignored or pushed aside or excused or in any other way “swept under
the rug” always has a way of building up and surfacing again.  God, on
the other hand, exposes us for the sinners that we are with His Law
and He forgives us in the Gospel of His Son.  And, unlike humans, when
God forgives, He forgets.  It’s a “done deal,” as they say.

    While the blessing of God’s forgiveness is free for us, it cost Him
dearly, because our sin is, as the Psalm tells us, “covered.”  And
what is it covered with?  It is covered with something else that the
world can’t appreciate--the innocent blood of Jesus Christ, shed on
the cross to make atonement for the sin of the whole world.  Because
God’s forgiveness is real, so is the sacrifice that our Savior made
for us in order to win the forgiveness of our sins.  But most people
don’t want to think about the suffering and death of Christ.  They
don’t mind the Christmas story or the miracles, but they don’t want to
hear about the cross.  It is exactly as Paul describes it:  “The word
of the cross,” he writes, “is folly to those who are perishing, but to
us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).
It is through this offensive spectacle of Christ’s crucifixion that
God has brought about reconciliation between Himself and His wayward
children.

    Whether it realizes it or not, the world that we live in is riddled
with guilts and hurts of every kind.  Unfortunately most people prefer
to deal with this by seeing themselves as victims rather than
culprits.  The saddest part of all this is that as long as people take
that attitude, they will never find relief for their guilts or hurts.
Help comes only in the cross of Jesus Christ, where we see at the same
time both the seriousness of our sin (for this is the kind of
punishment our sin deserves) and the depths of God’s redeeming love
for sinners (for this is how far He was willing to go to save us).  By
the power of the Holy Spirit we know this and, knowing it, we are the
ones “in whose spirit[s] there is no deceit.”  We live daily in His
forgiveness and we respond to it by forgiving others as well so that
He may glorified in us and His salvation may be proclaimed in our
words and deeds.  It is His Spirit, working through the Gospel, that
makes this happen.

Amen.

May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood,
making us kings and priests before His God and Father, lead you to a
life of repentance and trust.  May He also be glorified in the lives
of you, His people.  He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.
Amen.

“SCENES OF HIS SUFFERING: THE HIGH PRIEST'S HOUSE” - Text: Luke 22:54

“SCENES OF HIS SUFFERING: THE HIGH PRIEST'S HOUSE”
Midweek Lenten Worship III
March 2, 2016
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania

TEXT:
Then they seized [Jesus] and led Him away, taking Him into the High
Priest’s house.

Luke 22:54 (ESV)

    On the past two Wednesday evenings we accompanied our Savior to the
upper room and to the garden.  Tonight we observe His first trial as
He stands before the religious authorities of His people.  Tonight
Jesus is on trial before the church, so to speak.  The Sanhedrin was
the “supreme court” for religious matters among the Jews.  It was made
up of seventy respected and prominent men: priests, rabbis, and
laymen.  We know that among those seventy there were at least two who
were secret followers of Jesus: Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who
later buried Jesus in Joseph’s tomb.  Tonight Jesus faces those who
are charged with carrying out the Law of God among the Jewish people
of His time and place.  In order to truly appreciate what is going on
here, we first must understand what Jesus is up against.  If ever a
trial were one-sided, this is the one.  If ever the deck were stacked
against a defendant in a court of law, it is here.  Jesus is first
taken to Annas, who had no business passing judgment on Him or even
questioning Him.  Annas was nothing more than a former High Priest who
happened to be the father-in-law of the current High Priest.  Finally
Jesus is taken to Caiaphas, the legitimate High Priest.  But Caiaphas
holds court with just a few hand-picked members of the Sanhedrin,
waiting until morning to get the whole council to “rubber stamp” the
judgment that he has already made.  Caiaphas’ secret meeting takes
place in the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness, as does
all evil work.  Everything is done privately, behind the scenes.  The
agenda for this meeting is pre-determined: Jesus must be put to death
as a public criminal.  It doesn’t really matter what the charge
against Him is.  Any charge that works will do.  There’s no need to
have an honest hearing of the case or a review of the evidence.
Caiaphas and his cohorts have already decided that the verdict will be
guilty and the sentence will be death, no matter what the charge is or
what the evidence indicates.  What we have before us this evening is
nothing more than a legal sham.

    Before this kind of court and these kinds of judges the Savior goes
on trial.  And what is the verdict?  No surprise here.  Jesus is
convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death (even though the
Sanhedrin, as a religious body, had no authority to pass judgment and
sentence offenders in capital cases).  But there is more than this
going on here.  The believing eye of the Christian looks deeper and
sees in this trial what the Savior proves concerning Himself.  In His
silence and in His words Jesus proves Himself to be the Fulfillment of
the past and the Hope of the future.

    Our Lord proves Himself to be the Fulfillment of the past in that He
is everything that God had promised in a Savior for the world.  The
Old Testament prophecies concerning the Messiah are pretty detailed.
One of these, in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, deals with the
suffering and death of the Messiah.  These words seem to take on a new
significance as they are fulfilled in Jesus.  As we behold His
majestic silence before this kangaroo court, we see the fulfillment of
Isaiah’s words:  “He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He
opened not His mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and
like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His
mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).  Jesus proves Himself to be the despised Servant
of the Lord, who suffers humiliation, pain, and even death--all to
atone for the sin of the world.

    Jesus proves Himself to be the Fulfillment of the past not only in
His silence but in His words as well, because He openly identifies
Himself as the Messiah of God.  Caiaphas had put Him under the oath of
the testimony and asked Him:  “Are You the Christ, the Son of the
Blessed?” (Mark 14:61).  To this Jesus replied:  “I am, and you will
see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with
the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62).  There is much more in this answer
than what immediately meets the ear of the twenty-first century
hearer, because Jesus is here identifying Himself not only as the
promised Messiah, but as God Himself.  He applies to Himself the
divine name, I AM--the name revealed by God to Moses from the burning
bush in the book of Exodus.  This response of Jesus becomes even more
interesting when you consider the fact that earlier, when Jesus had
miraculously fed the five thousand and the crowd tried to make Him
king by force, He would have no part of it.  But now, on trial for His
life and being questioned by one who is looking for any excuse to
condemn Him, Jesus doesn’t deny His divinity, even though His
statement will result in certain condemnation.

    In this trial before the religious authorities Jesus shows Himself to
be not only the Fulfillment of the past, but also the Hope of the
future.  This is clear from the rest of Jesus’ response to the
questioning of the High Priest.  Jesus goes on to say, “You will see
the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the
clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62).  He certainly doesn’t mince any words
here.  He speaks very clearly and boldly of His future glory.  The
story of our Lord and Savior is not something that is confined to a
library of sixty-six books, all written over two thousand years ago.
The story isn’t over yet.  In His words to the High Priest He tells us
that He’s coming again with power and glory and warns the High Priest
that He will come again as Judge to make all things right.

    This future glory--this second coming of Christ--is our future hope.
It is our future hope because when He comes in majesty, He will summon
to Himself all those who believe in Him.  This is our only hope for
deliverance from the difficulties of this world--this “vale of tears,”
or “valley of sorrow” as Luther calls it in his catechism (Small
Catechism, explanation of the Seventh Petition of the Lord’s Prayer).
When the Lord comes back to take us home, nothing will ever come
between the Redeemer and the redeemed.  He will take them to Himself,
comforting them and caring for them forever, as John the evangelist
describes it in his Revelation:  “The Lamb in the midst of the throne
will be their Shepherd,” he writes, “and He will guide them to springs
of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes”
(Revelation 7:17).  He who has fulfilled all of God’s promises of the
past will also fulfill all of His promises of the future--the promises
that He makes even now to those who put their trust in Him.

    In this trial of our Lord and Savior we hear His silence and His
words.  He is silent on His own behalf but He speaks up for us.  He
does not deny the charges raised against Him, false though they are.
He is silent before His accusers, His tormentors, His murderers.  But
for our sake He breaks His silence, even though the words that He
speaks are sure to seal His fate.  The words that He speaks, while
they may be upsetting to Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, are welcome words
for us because they give us the comfort of knowing who He is and what
He is all about: the Fulfillment of the past and the Hope of the
future for us.

Amen.

May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood,
making us kings and priests before His God and Father, lead you to a
life of repentance and trust.  May He also be glorified in the lives
of you, His people.  He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.
Amen.