Jesus the Prophet and its implications . . .

     There will be a lot of sermons today on the inevitability of God’s plan.  Rightly so, people will try and tie the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70AD to the assassination of JFK, this being the fiftieth (yes, fiftieth) year since that tragic event; to the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001; to the events surrounding Katrina and Sandy and the recent storm that slammed the Philippines; and maybe even to some particularly local tragedies.  The idea will be to remind listeners that no matter what happens, no matter how bad things really seem to be going, God is still in control.  That is, of course, always a good sermon reminder.  Sometimes, life’s events seem to be so overwhelming that we forget our Lord has already redeemed us.  For many today, it may be even more appropriate.  Not a small number of people wonder whether our country will be able to survive our debt.  Two or three decades ago, it would have been as impossible for Americans to consider a world without us; now, after tons of personal bankruptcies brought on by bad spending habits and economic forces, people wonder whether the shining light of our democracy is fading.  It is important that we remind ourselves that, whatever happens, God still is committed to all of us who claim Him as Lord through the work and person of His well-beloved Son.  No event on earth can frustrate His promise to us.

     I wanted us to focus, however, on a different lesson in today’s readings from Luke’s Gospel.  In truth, part of my motivation stems from a Facebook discussion I had with some other clergy, theologians, and parishioners.  There was a bit of discussion about whether the signs of our Lord’s Second Coming are upon us.  After all, we have two comets in the east-southeastern dawn sky.  We just had a super storm slam the Philippines.  I’ve lost track as to how many official wars are happening right now, never mind the constant combat that some are seeing despite the lack of a formal declaration of war.  Certainly our companion dioceses of Swaziland and Nzara remind us that hunger is an issue for our brothers and sisters there.  We in the Midwest have experienced a couple harsh droughts the last two summers.  I have not heard which one is “rampant” this year, but I figure there will be another deadly flu epidemic at some point in our future, be it swine or bird or some other animal flu.

     And what of Jesus’ other warning, the persecution and imprisonment and killing of Christians?  I am not a huge acceptor of the claim that we Christians in the United States are persecuted.  We are, to a degree.  Yes, I understand that we are forced, through the new healthcare plan, to fund procedures and practices which we or many of our fellow brothers and sisters consider immoral.  I think, to the extent that many have raised their voices in the election process and availed themselves of the legal system in an attempt to make sure our rights were not abridged, we have made it clear what we support and what we do not.  The same is true for other, let’s call them social decisions.  Pick an easy issue around here, gambling.  I think the voices that predicted years ago the negative consequences of allowing gambling have born fruit.  I would imagine that, some day in the future, if we survive our city councils, sociologists will look back on our decisions and scratch their heads.  The same might be said of other more controversial issues.

     The fact of the matter, brothers and sisters, is that we are not really persecuted.  Or, if we prefer, maybe we should testify that we are persecuted-lite.  We have the right to speak.  We have the right to run for office.  We have the right and the opportunity to make our opinions known and to debate them in the public square.  It is a sad, but undeniable fact, that we have often lost.  Yes, we are sometimes mocked and teased for our positions, but, in losing, nobody is burning down our churches as they do in some countries in the world.  Government or quasi-government forces are not bursting into churches and gunning churchgoers down.  Obama supporters were not rounding up Romney supporters and killing them and taking their property after the last election; similarly, Bush supporters were not rounding up Gore supporters and treating them likewise.  Clergy are not being hauled off to jail or prison camps in an effort to kill a congregation by removing its head.  Spend some time talking to Bishops Elinah or Samuel, where the despot rounds up all who offend him or army groups kidnap your sheep.  That, brothers and sisters, is persecution.  That, brothers and sisters, is costly discipleship.  Talk to an Anglican brother or sister in Pakistan; speak with a Coptic Christian in Egypt; engage a Christian refugee from Iraq if you want to begin to understand the persecution of which Jesus speaks in this passage.

     The passage our lectionary editors chose for today is interesting because of the debate that can come from them.  As I have mentioned already, we can wonder whether the signs are aligning, signifying His imminent return.  In our discussions last week, I spoke of how futile it is to guess the moment of His return.  The same Christ who prophesied the utter destruction of the Temple in 70AD also gave us a couple other instructions regarding His return.  He tells these same disciples that only the Father knows when He will return; He promises in many places that His return will surprise everyone like a thief in the night or returning bridegroom; and He also instructs us that His return will be obvious, glorious.  We do not have to worry about missing His return.  All the world will know it!

     The passage is also interesting because it focuses our attention on Jesus as prophet.  In the Christian tradition, we acknowledge that Jesus is the Prophet, the Priest, and the King.  Next week we will look at His role as King, and we often spend time discussing how He sacrificed Himself to atone for our sins.  We tend to neglect, it seems to me, our discussion of Jesus as Prophet.  We discuss it around the Transfiguration, when He appears with Moses and Elijah, but we tend to not pay close attention to the role for the rest of the church year.  Jesus is teaching the disciples, and by extension us, of what we are to expect when we pick up our crosses and follow Him.  Has any generation of disciples ever not experienced persecution?  No.  Has any generation never heard of wars?  Natural disasters?  Signs even in the heavens?  Even His death?  No.  In a sense, verse 32 of this chapter is repeated over and over, although it is beyond the scope of our reading today.

     The truth of His prophecies, brothers and sisters, are not just academic exercises.  How were men and women in Israel to determine whether one was a prophet?  Prophets could say nothing which contradicted God, and their prophecies had to come true.  Israel was commanded to take prophets very seriously.  If someone claimed to be a prophet, Israel was instructed to judge their words against God’s torah and against the prophesied event’s occurrence.  If they prophesied an event that did not come to pass, they were to be considered false prophets and killed.  They were not to be tolerated in Israel.

     Now, in our story today, along comes this rabbi who is teaching in the very center of what should have been the spiritual heart of Israel.  What does He say?  As magnificent as it is, it will be utterly destroyed.  Those hearing this statement were clearly disturbed.  In their collective memory is the story of the Exile and return.  God has allowed His house to be destroyed once.  It was not a good time for them.  Along comes this miracle worker from Nazareth who prophesies its utter and complete destruction.  Who wants to revisit those times?  Who, listening, really wants to think that the unthinkable could happen again?  Who does He think He is claiming that God’s house of worship could be taken away . . . again?

     Those of us who study history know that this prophecy is one of the reasons for which the Sanhedrin convicts Jesus of treason.  In their efforts to convict Jesus of blaspheme, they will try to cite this prediction.  We also know that Jesus is proven correct.  Judea rebelled against Rome in 66AD.  It was a relatively modest conflict by length of time.  The end result was that Jerusalem was sacked by the Roman legion in 70AD, after a dreadful period of warfare and occupation.  Those more interested in this war can turn to Josephus and his account in the Jewish Wars.  Josephus describes survival for the Jews in stark terms, going so far as to write that the Jews consumed the flesh of dead babies and children in order to survive.  Looking at your faces, I can see that you now understand why Jesus goes on to lament that the period will be especially brutal for nursing moms and soon-to-give-birth women.  He tells all who hear this prediction that they should flee to the hills, when they see the encamped army, to avoid the coming devastation that will ultimately destroy much of what they hold dear.

     Jesus goes on to comfort those who hear His prediction.  Times will be bad.  All will seem lost.  Even then, in the midst of the devastation, God’s people will have reason to hope.  One day, He will return and the world will tremble.  In that day, if we are alive to witness it, we are to rejoice because our salvation is upon us!  What others will dread, we will look upon expectation.  Of course, that day is at some point in the future.  As expert as Jesus is about prophesying, he is far more focused on the day to day living of His disciples.  We are not told to sit and speculate; we are told to go and make disciples through daily living.  People are, in part, to be drawn to Him by our faithful lives.  Not just our words, but our examples, even our examples in the face of catastrophes, will entice others to join His people.  It is a powerful passage, to be sure, but it derives its power not just from the fact that Jesus accurately forecasts an incredible event in Israel’s future.  As our Collect reminds us today, there must be something for us to hear, to learn, and to inwardly digest from this passage.  What could be a message for us today?  What is the power which it hold for us this day?

     It seems to me that the passage ought to cause an interesting response from three different modern groups.  For those among us who are seeking this Jesus, to see if His love for you is true and able to be believed, this ought to be one of those passages that reassures you.  One of our claims about our Lord is that He was raised from the dead by God.  He is the first fruit of the world to come.  Imagine the honor and glory!  Do you think God would bestow that upon a liar, upon someone undeserving?  Christianity rightly claims that Jesus of Nazareth was unique because of the Resurrection.  There are, however, other stories which are meant to draw others into the conversation.  For some, it may be the healing miracles; for others, it may be the feeding miracles; for still others, it may the realization that Jesus foretold events.  If His prediction about the Temple proved true, what else might be true of His predictions?  What other messages from God might He have born?  Put differently, His role as Prophet might well begin a conversation with those who do not yet call Him Lord.

     Another modern group which must confront this passage is the descendants of the Jews.  Hear me carefully, I am not at all a fan of browbeating people into believing in Jesus.  I am one of those who believes that Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants would be a light to the world and a nation of priests.  When we condemn the Jews for the crucifixion; we are in reality condemning our own family.  When we condemn Jews for being Jews, we condemn the people of our Lord.  Jesus challenged those who walked apart, but He was eagerly willing to love them into His kingdom.  Not quite two chapters prior to this passage, our Lord laments the fact that Israel missed the time of His coming to her.  We do well to remember His example.  Nor, however, am I a fan of condemning others by avoiding the difficult questions and allowing them to continue in error.  If Jesus truly is the Son of God and Son of Man as He claimed, and if He truly was raised from the dead as His disciples testified, those of us with Jewish friends can use this prophesy, its use by the Sanhedrin, and the Resurrection to challenge some assumptions of faithful Jews in our lives.  Did Jesus utter these words?  The Sanhedrin, the group that really plotted to have Jesus killed, themselves testified that He did.  Did the prophesy come true?  Absolutely.  What does that suggest about Jesus’ relationship to God?  That He really was a prophet.  More importantly, though, if even those who opposed and ultimately condemned this Jesus testified that He made the prophesy and history teaches us its accuracy, what else might be true of His claims?  That He is truly the messiah.

     Of course the strongest message in this passage is for His disciples.  Before His return, before even these portents and signs occur, we will suffer persecution because of Him.  Notice, we do not need to provoke others.  They will be at enmity with our Lord because of who He is.  We will suffer simply because He is our Lord.  They will hate us simply because we believe Him to be the messiah.  We will be arrested and brought before the powerful of the world.  We might even be betrayed or abandoned by our families.  How should we respond?  Should we be afraid?  Should we reconsider?  No.  Our Lord promises, just as He will after the Resurrection, that He is always with us.  He will give us words; He will give us wisdom.  And in the end, simply for running the good race, for persevering in our faith, for struggling to do what He commands, we will gain our lives.  We may lose these bodies and see these mortal frames perish, but we will live forever with Him.  And as we reminded ourselves last week, that future with Him is nothing like we have ever experienced.  What is to come is beyond our wildest dreams or hopes.  And we will continue in that blessed state for al eternity.  That is His promise; His promise is sure.

     To those of us who are His disciples, there is also a warning.  He tells us not to be deceived.  People will come along and claim to be able to interpret the signs and even to be Him.  We need not worry about missing Him, about being left behind, about anything regarding His Second Coming.  Though His return will be sudden, it will not be hidden.  Our lectionary editors choose not to read part of the warning, but it is part of this teaching in Luke.  The cares of the world are real.  This world really does cause pain and hurt.  But we are not of this world.  We are only sojourners here, travelers looking expectantly toward that day when He takes us to His Kingdom.  If we are not attentive, He teaches, it is possible that we will be weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness and the anxieties of life and find that day like a closed trap.  We are called to gather together to worship, to pray, to exhort, to teach, to study, to comfort and be comforted in times of mourning, and to celebrate in times of joy, always cognizant of His imminent return and with no reason to fear that day, and always, always mindful that He has entrusted to us the responsibility of inviting others into His kingdom.

Peace,

Brian†

Here's your invitation . . .

Refresh Thy people on their toilsome way,
Lead us from night to never-ending day;
Fill all our lives with love and grace divine,
And glory, laud, and praise be ever Thine. -- Last verse of God of our Fathers #712

     Our lesson today speaks to the refreshment and hope that we have in God.  You might be wondering why I would say that, given that it is a reading about Levirate marriage and the Age to come.  It is a bit about the former and more so the latter, but it also speaks to the hope that all of us desire, the longing that we all feel.

     The Sadducees decide to take a try at Jesus in this encounter.  As everyone knows, the Pharisees and Sadducees got along about as well as DC Republicans and DC Democrats.  Neither side had much use for the other.  Though I hesitate to use our terms to describe them, the Sadducees considered themselves the true instructors of the torah.  The Sadducees only accepted the writings of Moses as foundational to their faith.  This willingness of other groups, such as the Pharisees, to use other writings and even summaries to convey the instructions of Yahweh, was simply unacceptable in their eyes.  After all, they had the writings of Moses, what you and I call the Pentateuch, to guide them.  As far as they were concerned, only Moses had spoken to God directly.  Only Moses had climbed the mountain, encountered the burning bush, received the torah of God, and heard His voice in the great theophany after Israel’s deliverance from slavery.  The Pharisees, of course, have had their turn.  They have tried to prove to the crowds that they are God’s chosen leaders.  Having been stumped by their tax question, whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not, they are silenced.

     Now, the Sadducees want to prove to the crowd that they are the ones who understand God best and are best equipped to put this local yokel pretending to be the messiah nonsense to rest.  They use as an example what many of us would be extreme.  They seem to be making up a story about a woman who marries a man who dies childless.  As a member of a righteous family, the younger brother takes the widow, his former sister-in-law, as a wife and agrees to father a son on her who will be the inheritor of his brother’s estate.  This practice, which may seem abhorrent to us in the modern West, is known as Levirate marriage and taught in Deuteronomy 25.

     Why would God teach His people to do such a thing?  Part of the reason would be pastoral for the woman involved.  As we have much discussed, the life of a widow was tough in the Ancient Near East.  God reminds us of just how marginalized widows were when He describes Himself as loving the widow and the orphan.  Israel was supposed to care for widows because God loved them and because their life was extremely harsh.  So, one purpose of this marriage was to care for someone who, most likely otherwise, would be unable to provide for themselves.

     The other reason for Levirate marriage we, sitting on this side of the cross, would describe as Sacramental.  Think back to your Confirmation Class.  What is a Sacrament?  Don’t worry, if you can’t answer, I think most of us in the room go with the “Once saved, always saved” doctrine of Protestants.  Failing to remember the right answer probably won’t cost you!  I bet if I start the answer most of you will join in: A Sacrament is an outward sign of an inward and visible grace.  When you and I gather each time around this altar and celebrate the Eucharist, we remember that we a taking part in a pledge of God.  In reality, when we gather for the Eucharist, we are reminding ourselves that Jesus is here and is coming again.  It is the parousia of the Gospel, but that is a message for another day.  

     Participation in the Eucharist reminds us, especially the high sacramentalists among us, that we are His people and that He is our God.  Imagine how you would feel were you forbidden to receive the Sacrament.  Possession of the Land served the same function in Israel.  How did they know that they were chosen by God?  How did they know that His promises to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were still in effect?  By possessing the Promised Land.  Israel’s presence in the Land signified to them that Yahweh was really in control and that He was still honoring His covenant with their ancestors.  Perhaps now you might have a better understanding why the Exile was so hard.  Being dispossessed of the Land signified to them that God had abandoned His promises to them.  It was a spiritually crushing development for those who tried to keep His covenant.

     Back to the issue of Levirate marriage then.  How did one make sure that a family did not die out?  If a man was killed by disease or in war before he had fathered a child on his wife, how was Israel supposed to view that family?  We know from Scripture and from our own experience that, when something bad happens to people, others assume that God is somehow punishing them.  Think of the man born blind at birth to show forth God’s glory when Jesus heals him.  People assumed that his parents had sinned greatly.  That was blindness.  What would have happened with dispossession of the Land, especially given its pre-sacramental understanding.  Now, perhaps, you understand another reason why God gave Israel Levirate marriage.  In addition to providing for the widow, it reminded people of the Covenant itself.  No one was excluded from God’s covenant, even when affected by unexpected and untimely deaths.  God’s covenant was always in effect!

     So, back to the challenge of the Sadducees.  The Sadducees believed that the idea of the resurrection of the dead was simple foolishness.  In our reading today, they use as their example the dilemma of Tobit.  Tobit, if the name seems unfamiliar to you, was one of those books rejected by the Jews but accepted by the early Church as Scripture.  You and I would say the book belongs to the apocrypha or the deuterocanonical books.  The Sadducees, of course, would have rejected the book out of hand as it clearly was not written by Moses.  But it would have been a well known story.  A righteous man, who tends to the needy and dead during the exile, needs a wife for his son.  Living in Nineveh during the Exile, finding an Israeli wife for his son, as commanded by the torah, will be very challenging.  A distant relative shows up to take the son to find a wife.  The distant relative has in mind a girl who has had seven husbands.  You see, on the wedding night of each of her marriages, a demon named Asmodeus has appeared and killed each of the bridegrooms.  Robin has chosen the sheep’s sarcasm today for our Order of Worship, but think about the underlying kernel of truth in the sheep’s statement.  What would cause brother three or four or six or seven to keep God’s instruction and marry their older brothers’ wife?  Faithfulness and righteousness.  Common sense told number four or five, at least, not to marry her.  Yet still they follow through.  Now, all the brothers, all the men, are dead.

     Tobit presents a huge pastoral problem: The son of a blind man in a foreign land needs a wife; a woman exiled herself has already gone through seven husbands.  Imagine what their neighbors thought.  Imagine what they thought.  I will never be able to marry.  Who will want me?  Why has God abandoned me and my family?  I don’t want to spoil everything for you, you really should read the book, but the young man, Tobiah, meets the girl, marries her, consummates the marriage, gets rid of the demon, and comes home with his new bride to the joy and happiness of his faithful father, Tobit.  And, best of all, the reader is informed how God took an active role in bringing this cursed widow and exiled son of a righteous man together.  To all outward appearances, both of these individuals and their families had been abandoned by God.  Yet God reminds them and those familiar with the story that He can save.

     The Sadducees, who reject this book as part of Scripture, no doubt look at the ridiculous problem it creates for those who believe in the Resurrection of the Dead as one of their justifications for rejecting it (the primary reason being it was not written by Moses).  If the Resurrection of the Dead is real, as some thought and some rejected, whose wife will she be in the after-life?  In asking the question, they expect no answer.  They have sat in their ivory towers and debated the wisest of their age for generations now.  The Resurrection of the Dead is fantasy.  And by forcing the “Rabbi” from Nazareth to answer the question, they will prove their intellectual and moral superiority to the crowd, and diminish this carpenter’s son in the process.

     No doubt Jesus’ response shocked them.  They wrongly presume that the after-life will simply be more of the same.  The drudgery of this world will continue, the only difference being that it will simply never end.  Jesus challenges that notion.  In reality, He points out that this world is so affected by sin that they cannot begin to understand the world to come.  He instructs them and us that in the world to come we are like the angels.  There is no marriage because it is no longer necessary.  Marriage exists here in part to create future generations, but in part to keep us from sinning.  Those desires you and I rightly call lust do not exist in the world to come.  There, we are recreated to understand His mind, to see with His eyes, and to hear with His ears.  We are no longer, in the world to come, affected by the Fall.  We are totally, completely redeemed!  Everything about us is reordered to glorify God as He intended when He created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden.

     It is a qualitatively different life those who are considered worthy of living in that age will get to experience.  Our liturgies remind us of this truth, even if we are like the Sadducees and forget the difference between this world and the next.  In our rite of Morning Prayer we often remind ourselves that God can do far more than we can ever ask or imagine.  In our concluding collects after the Prayers of the People, we sometimes remind ourselves that He offers good things for which we dare not ask, or, in our blindness, we cannot see to ask. We are so blinded and affected by our sin that we lose sight of the life, the glory, to which He calls each and every one of us.  We get so caught up in the world we experience that we lose sight of the fact that our Father in heaven intends good for us.  Actually, He intends far better than what we would call great.  All that we experience on earth falls far short of what He had in mind when He created us and placed us in the Garden.

     It is for that reason when Matthew and Mark recount this story that Jesus reminds the Sadducees and us that they do not understand the Scriptures, nor do they understand the redeeming power of God.  They do not understand the Scriptures or the redeeming power of God because they live on the wrong side of the Cross and Resurrection!  And the very example they cite foreshadows that which they do not understand!  In general terms, what is the story of Tobit, which they reject?  A father sends his son, in the company of a heavenly spirit, to find a bride, redeem the bride by defeating the tormenting demon, and bring her safely home.  Sound familiar?  What is the path that Jesus is walking?  The Father sends the Son, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to find His Bride, the Church, redeem her by defeating the powers of sin and death and hell, and then bring her safely home to a great celebration!  In other words, Tobiah’s journey prefigures Christ’s in a very real way.  Now you know why the early Church considered Tobit part of Scripture, and you know why you should read the book.  Tobit told the story of Christ, a few centuries before Christ walked the earth.

     Ironically, the Sadducees are trying to use a story which should help lead them to recognize the Christ among them to try and prove wrong the very thing He has come to accomplish.  They want to use the story of Tobit’s daughter-in-law to mock and disparage those who believe in the Resurrection of the Dead; Jesus has come to conquer death and to demonstrate that the Resurrection is real!  Talk about cross purposes!  And that is why Jesus tells them they do not understand the Scriptures nor the power of God.  He is here to accomplish the very thing they reject.

     Why is it important for us to understand that the Resurrection is real?  Because it should inform all our actions and be the source of our hope.  I mentioned at the beginning of this how easy it should be for us to understand the spiritual condition of Sarah (the bride) and her family and the spiritual condition of Tobit and Tobiah.  To all outward appearances, they have all been abandoned by God.  They are dispossessed of the Land and living in exile.  Finding a spouse in such a condition was nigh impossible for those wishing to live as God commanded.  Spiritual forces of evil are even arrayed against them, to help make them a byword of their neighbors.  Heck, poor Tobit was blinded simply for doing what God demanded of all of Israel!  In the story of Tobit, two families are outwardly restored to God’s favor.  The rest of the world might have thought them abandoned by God, but God paid close attention to all their travails and sufferings.  In the end, through a simple marriage, hope is restored to two families.  Yes, it took an archangel to ensure that hope, but God sent Raphael for that very purpose.

     Our lives are sometimes like Sarah’s and Tobiah’s.  Each of us, I dare say, has experienced those moments of doubt, those moments when the Enemy’s whispers seem a shrill roar in our ears.  Let’s be honest, some of us are wondering about His love for us now.  In this community we have questions of provision, questions of health, difficulties in relationships, sufferings of addiction, and any number of other outward appearances which might make us feel that our Lord has forgotten us.  Worse, the sufferings that we experience might be used by His Enemy to convince others that we are cut off, that there is no use to trying to be faithful because the world wins as God sleeps or ignores “His people”.  It is in those dark moments of our own walk or in the walks of others that the Resurrection literally shines like a lighthouse on a foggy shore or a spotlight in a dark theater!

     What God did for Sarah and Tobiah was pretty cool.  He redeemed their lives and their families through a marriage.  What does He promise us?  We, too, will be redeemed as participants in a wonderful marriage!  The image that Scripture uses over and over is the idea of the wedding feast.  Christ comes to redeem His Bride.  She may wear a soiled  or ripped gown, She may be of questionable moral conduct, She is most certainly not worthy of His love--Still, He comes to redeem Her!  As part of that Bride, you and I share in that redemption.  All of us have issues, to be frank we have subscriptions, which make us unlovable.  Yet even when we rejected Him, He came and died that we might know love and its transforming power.  And to remind us all that everything can be redeemed by Him, God raised Jesus that Easter morning so long ago.  The message to us was simple: If He can conquer death, what in our lives can He not overcome?

     Now you and I stand, by virtue of our baptism and Christ’s faithful work, in the assurance of His promises.  We gather week in and week out to remind ourselves that He is coming again.  The Body we eat and the Blood we drink are just a hint of an appetizer as to what is promised us!  What is promised us is qualitatively different than anything we have experienced on earth.  As human beings constrained by space and finances, our wedding feasts are limited.  We agonize over who to invite, what food to serve, what drinks to offer, and what music to play as we celebrate the nuptials of those in our families.  Feelings can be hurt; people can feel put out simply because of those constraints with which we must deal.  Our Lord has no such problem.  We know from Scripture that He ferments the best wine!  We know from Scripture that the dance, the perichoresis, of the the Trinity and the Redeemed is unlike anything seen here on earth.  We know that our joyful noises can be music to His ears.  In ways unimagined or not understood by us, God can take our cacophony of tastes and likes and create a symphony whose harmony cannot be heard on earth.

     And here’s the best part, brothers and sisters: We get to invite everyone and spend our Father’s resources!  This is not a feast which is limited.  We do not have to pick and choose whom we should invite.  In fact, our Lord commands us to go into all the world inviting all whom we encounter!  Think of that joyful responsibility for just a second.  Each of us gathered here who has accepted Christ as Lord is just like Sarah of the seven husbands or Tobiah.  We and our circumstances have been redeemed.  Our Father has even gone so far as to promise that all our sufferings will have meaning.  And feeling that joy at snatching life from the grasp of death, at finding that God loves us even when the world thinks otherwise, ought to inspire us to share that invitation far and wide.  We get a chance to share with those whom we love and those whom we meet far better than Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.  We get to share an invitation to a wedding feast the likes of which this world has never seen.

     How different will this feast be?  Only God knows for sure.  We only see and hear in shadows.  We know that the next Age will be different from this one.  There will be no sin, no crying, no suffering, and no death.  One thing which stands out, though, is its importance to our Lord.  Two thousand years ago, as He sat among His disciples and instituted this meal which you and I are about to share, what did He say about His own cup?  Our Lord eschewed the fourth cup, the Cup of Joy, at that feast and told us He would not drink from that Cup until the Wedding Feast.  Given His penchant for going to parties (remember, He ran with some crazy crowds and hard partiers), can you imagine what He has in mind for the Day when He breaks His fast?  Me either.  If the world to come had a need for police departments, I can only imagine how many precincts would have to respond!  What I do know is that it is our privilege, our joyful responsibility, to invite all those we meet to share in that eternal feast, to invite everyone to join us at that Party!

Peace,

Brian†