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Sermon 12/21/2025 – Joseph and Epimetheus

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 1:18-25

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

“Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means, “God is with us.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.

Sermon Text

 Long ago, in the legends of Ancient Greece, there emerged the story of Prometheus. Prometheus was a titan, one of the first divine beings (so the Greeks said.) He loved humanity and strove to make sure they had an advantage over the immense power of the Olympian Gods. First, he tricked the Gods into taking the worse deal in animal sacrifices. Two bags were prepared, one with choice meat placed on top of a pile of bones, skin, and fat, another with a worse cuts placed over the majority of the animal. The Gods chose the better cuts and bones, not knowing they had been tricked.

Later, Prometheus orchestrated his most famous exploit. He stole fire from Heaven and brought it down to earth. This allowed for humans to develop society, to forge metal and cook food. Now, through his work, humanity would grow and thrive upon the face of the earth. For stealing this divine secret, however, he was punished to be tied to a rock and tortured for the rest of eternity. A vicious punishment, but still a better outcome than his brother.

Prometheus had a brother you see, and his name was Epimetheus. He was not as clever as his brother, in fact their names meant “Forethought,” and “Afterthought,” you can guess which he was. The Gods, upset that fire had been stolen from them, devised a way to get back at humanity. They gave Epimetheus a beautiful wife named “Pandora,” and entrusted her to him. He loved her deeply and so when the Gods offered him a box, with the stipulation it must never be opened, he of course entrusted it to her. Pandora, the witless pawn in this adventure, opened the box and from it sprang every evil in the world. Last to exit was the greatest evil of them all, and yet also the one thing that might sustain human life… Hope.

So, why do I begin our meditation on this, the final Sunday of Advent, with a pagan myth about the origin of evil in the world? Well, I am not exactly sure myself. As I was working on planning this season, the story of Joseph learning of Mary’s pregnancy mingled in my head with this old myth, and I think its because I see in Joseph a bit of Epimetheus’s charm. Jospeh was a good man, who loved his wife-to-be, but did not think through his actions very far.

You see, Joseph learned that his fiancé Mary was pregnant, and so he decided he should break off the marriage. If it was his kid, or if he thought it could be, they would just move up the date of the marriage. Even in Judea, babies were born a few months shy of nine months after the wedding fairly often. We know that the baby could not be Joseph’s, because he hears of the pregnancy and immediately knows he is not the father. So, to avoid shaming her, he decides to break off the marriage privately, so no one need know why he did it.

There is, of course, a problem. Joseph and Mary are living in a village. If there are five hundred people living there than it would be a surprise. Among five hundred people, everyone knows everyone else’s business pretty quickly. Joseph, if he followed through with his plan, would save Mary none of the difficulty of her pregnancy. He would, however, avoid having to deal with the fallout himself. I do not think this is selfishness, but lack of planning that leads him to this idea. Joseph, for love of his fiancé, believes breaking off the marriage will fix her problems. He is wrong.

An unmarried woman faces enough trouble today, imagine in a world where she could be stoned to death for adultery. For the rest of her life Mary would be treated as a pariah, her child as worse than that. Mary had no place in this world, not if Joseph followed through with his plan. She and her child would be abandoned… God knows what that would have done if it had been allowed to continue. Thankfully, God had other plans.

An angel visited Joseph in his dreams and explained the situation. Joseph accepted this divine message and married his fiancé. Mary had her child, the child who was not Joseph’s, and yet the child became his own child, through his willingness to abandon his own bad idea. Now Joseph is acknowledged for his incredible love and commitment to a child he could have easily thrown aside. Joseph was willing to turn away from what he thought he knew about life, about the world, and in the process bring life into it, not just through a literal birth, but through supporting our savior as he grew into the ministry he had ahead of him.

What I hope we can take from Joseph’s story, and his shortsighted, knee-jerk reaction to Mary’s pregnancy, is the realization that a bad idea is not the end of our story. When we come into a situation we are not prepared for, we may have all kinds of ideas for how to deal with them. A calm mind will let us see that many of those reactions are not good, and if we take time to think through their repercussions we might be pleasantly surprised with what God can do with a person who thinks ahead. Joseph needed divine intervention to change his mind, and honestly I think we often need that exact same spark to change our ways.

Our faith is built off of Christ’s work within it. When we meet Christ, we should constantly be reorienting ourselves to be more like him. That reorientation requires us to abandon some of the ideas we have about ourselves, about the world, about our conduct. In my own life, I have seldom regretted a decision I made thoughtfully, but have regretted plenty that I made impulsively. When we take the time to think of how our actions impact others, when we are willing to accept a different perspective, when we are open to what God is doing… Then the hope of Christ’s reign is made plain to us. Go forward then, willing to change your mind in the face of God’s work in your life. Think before you act, not just living reactively. Then you will see God’s salvation, and truly know what it means to welcome Christ into your life. – Amen.

Sermon 09/07/2025 – Two Paths

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall certainly perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him, for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”

Sermon Text

As I have said many times, I am directionally challenged. While I can map out physical space fairly well, figuring out where North, South, East, and West are without issue, I am completely useless at figuring out where one road connects to another. It does not help that here is West Virginia, roads developed around hills – you cannot assume a grid layout for a town anymore than you can assume that a road that ends in one place does not start up several miles down the way.

If I can tell a story that will serve as our parable for the day, I would like to cast the vision of the road to Bridgeport – our metaphorical Heaven – and the road to Flemington – our metaphorical Hell (I do not feel strongly about either town, this is an appraisal of their respective roads.)

When I would go to visit the Bridgeport Nursing Home, I would inevitably come to a crossroad. At that crossroad, I could turn left toward Flemington, or drive straight ahead to Bridgeport. The road to Bridgeport would take me up to Emily Drive, where there were a bunch of stores and therefore a great deal of traffic. Going that route was never my ideal, and with the intense amount of roadwork happening at the time, I especially wanted to avoid it. Looking at the path I had ahead of me, I chose what I thought would be best – to drive down to Flemington and then cut across back into Clarksburg.

The problem is that, while Flemington did run parallel to Route 50, which was my goal to reach, it never actually connected to Route 50. I could drive for over an hour and I would only find myself on the interstate for my trouble, completely removed from my goal of reaching home. To follow the road to Flemington was to follow the road to being more lost than I ever could be if I just learned to deal with the road work.

In our walk of faith, we are also presented with two paths. One is the straight and narrow path that “few find.”[1] The other is broader, flatter, and much easier to saunter our way down. What I want us to understand, especially today as we launch our fall season here at Grace, is that the choice we make to follow one path or the other is not as simple as saying, “Yes,” once or “No,” once – but requires us to reevaluate our life again and again. For me on my way home I could go one way or the other, meanwhile we have a thousand roads that move us toward God or away from God, and sometimes we will drift slowly down the wrong path without even realizing it.

Every day we have thousands of interactions – digitally, physically, and even mentally – that shape our souls and the souls of people around us. When we stop into the gas station and look the attendant in the eye and treat them like a full person, that makes a difference. When we walk by the beggar on the street without even acknowledging they exist, that makes a difference. When we sit in our house and stew over something someone said or did, that makes a difference. Again and again and again, life gives us routes we can choose to take or not take, and the difference in the major ones are what we usually focus on. However, it is in those little byroads we get the most lost.

When I look back on my life, I see major departures I could have taken. If I accepted I was going to be a minister when I first felt that was my call, back in High School, what would have changed? If I had avoided the disastrous relationship I had in college that threatened to rip my family apart and that ended several key friendships in my life, what would that do? If I had known far earlier about my depression and had it treated, what might I have done?

These big turning points stand out to us, but they usually are more complicated than a “Good” or “Bad” choice. My call to ministry was put on hold by my unwillingness to accept it, but because I went into chemistry first, I was much better equipped to talk to folks throughout the pandemic because of my background in science – plus I have been able to tutor people! My disastrous relationship caused all kinds of trouble, but it also taught me an awful lot about myself, about forgiveness, about the need to be good to people and not accept when someone wants you to be something other than who you truly are. In every path that seems to me to be an obvious binary choice, I see that God took me down the road I needed to go down, that still led to the path I needed to take.

The key difference in the path that leads to life and death is that you can imperfectly do good, but there is never a good way to do something bad. Driving to Flemington would never bring me to Route 50, but going to Bridgeport I had two or three different roads to lead me home – some better than others. In the same way, we have to acknowledge which roads we take in life that lead us to greater life and fuller understanding of God, self, and neighbor – even imperfectly – and which ones only cause us harm.

Cruelty is the most obvious road that will not save us. If we ignore the needs of others, excuse injustice of any kind, and generally allow ourselves to hold onto disdain for our neighbors – even our enemies- we will destroy ourselves. Self-indulgence is another way to destroy the self. If we never tell ourselves “No,” then we will demand more and more and more. We do not always need a new phone, just cause an upgrade is available. We do not need to eat out every time we do not want to cook. We can spend our time, our money, our social battery a little better and suddenly find ourselves better at regulating our self and managing our world.

I do want to say that there are still obviously bad choices in life. If we struggle with addiction and refuse help, then we are setting ourselves up to continue to suffer. (The sin here I should say is not addiction, which is a medical issue, but denying the problem.) If we are edging our way toward infidelity – emotionally or otherwise – we will destroy our relationships. If we are actively working to harm people, to steal or defraud them, to do all manner of things we know to be wrong, then we are setting ourselves up for a fall.

The thing about our daily, incidental mistakes, is that we can usually recover from them. If I snap at my wife because I am frustrated about something, we can work that out after I apologize. However, if I feed into that decision to take things out on her, I will destroy our marriage given enough time. When we make mistakes habitually, such that they become conscious choices, we move away from detours and onto a deliberate and direct path toward oblivion. For some things the solution is just to turn around, to desist, to try something else.

The good news is that we are always able to turn around. Repentance in Hebrew is “Shuv,” which literally means to do an about-face. We go in the opposite direction and move back toward the right way of being. It is a long road back sometimes and repenting does not make us not have to face the consequences of our actions – in fact a true attitude of repentance will require us to make amends fully for the wrong we have caused. I was never going to get to my house by driving through Flemington, I had to turn back around, that is true for some things in our own life too.

Today, we are given the same choice that the Hebrews were given long ago. Take the path toward life and abundance, or the road that leads to destruction. The road toward life is a harder road, it requires honesty and repentance and all manner of goodness. The road to destruction will give you everything you want, when you want it, but leave you empty, for the “worm quenchest not.”[2] I pray we choose the right path, and turn from the ones we need to, which are leading us to destruction.

[1] Matthew 7:14

[2] This is a misquotation of “the worm diest not,” from Mark 9:48; combining the worm’s immortality with the unquenchable fire mentioned later in the verse. I find myself saying “the worm quenchest not,” more often, and so I have preserved my malapropism here.

Sermon 08/17/2025 – Craving Falsehood

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Jeremiah 23:23-29

Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord. I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, “I have dreamed! I have dreamed!” How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back—those who prophesy lies and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart? They plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal. Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord. Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?

Sermon Text

I am a strong advocate for truth. As obvious as that can seem, it often falls to the wayside in the rush of daily life in our world. All of us are prone, whether we want to admit it or not, to finding a version of reality that is more palatable than the one in which we live. We talked just two weeks ago about the fact that the cycles of life can exhaust us. In the midst of that exhaustion we can choose to chase after true hope or manufactured hope. Do we find our hope in the truth or do we create a false reality that offers its own false hope?

Despite my commitment to truth, I do acknowledge that many so-called “warriors,” of truth are just bullies. Growing up, I was blessed to have people on my television like Carl Sagan who explained concepts of science in terms that my five-year-old self could not quite understand, but which nonetheless opened me to the wonders of this universe. Now the people who are trying to educate people about deep truths of the universe are usually people who are trying to make money or build clout more so than people who truly wish to educate. We are a culture that is dependent upon bombasticity and upon people fighting each other for engagement, and so we do not often find people educating or revealing truth, so much as selling a narrative or offering confirmation of our own ideas.

As I’ve already said, the tactic of bullies is to take hold of this idea of an objective truth and then to beat people with what their perspective is. However, truth is separate from what we may have as a concept of what is right or wrong. A true situation can be good, or a true situation can be bad, the duty we have as interpreters of this world is to decide how we react to the truth. Truth, nonetheless, sits separate from our impression of it. A true thing might be good, or it might be bad, but it remains true.

What we read today out of the book of Jeremiah comes after a period of time in which Jeremiah has said some of his most devastating prophecies. If you read the book of Jeremiah, you will see a man who is constantly given the chance to advocate for his people and who constantly decides they weren’t worth the time. He stands in front of God and pleads saying that there must be righteous people in Jerusalem, there must be righteous people in Judah, and in the next chapter every time that he does this he is shown that there is in fact very little hope for the people he knows. The prophet is beaten down by the words that he has been given. He describes his bones as cracking, his stomach as boiling, his mouth as pouring out fire, even as his eyes are running out of tears to shed. Still, the whole time he is suffering under the weight of truth, there are other prophets selling a more convenient message.

We get a direct interaction with one of these prophets in Jeremiah 28. Jeremiah wore a wooden yoke around his neck to symbolize the oppression his people suffered under Babylon. A fellow prophet came in one day and broke that wooden yoke. He promises the people that, rather than suffering, they are going to be liberated through the work of their king. Jeremiah looks this prophet in the eye and says “Oh, that that would be true! However, the truth is that God has forecasted an even darker day for the people of Judah. I will be replacing this wooden yoke with one made of iron.” Jeremiah is proven right as the people are taken into exile and some of them forced to flee into Egypt rather than to face their annihilation. The prophet is not happy that he is correct, the message he brings is not a good one, but it is true.

I wish to put forward that there are two things we do to explain the state of the world that are harmful to truth. The first is that we deny when there are problems in this world and the second is that we create easy answers to explain the ones we do acknowledge. On one hand we look out at the broken things of the world and say, “They aren’t really that bad!” On the other hand, we say, “They are that bad! And its all because of those folks over there!” When we simplify the world and its problems, erasing them or making them someone else’s problem, we deny the truth that is plainly laid out around us.

When I was serving in Clarksburg, there was a fairly significant population of homeless folk. If you talked to people in authority in the city, they would tell you they were bussed in regularly by outside forces. They were people who were unwanted in the cities they came from and were sent to Clarksburg to become the city’s problem. This is a storyline many cities adopt, and it comes from a shred of truth. Some cities do choose not to help folk and instead move inconvenient populations in their midst. However, the truth in Clarksburg was harder to stomach. Of those surveyed during the shelter season, some 200 souls, a vast majority were locals. People who fell into a bad habit, or lost a job, or had rent raised above their means, and ended up on the street. The people out on the street were not someone else’s problem – they were our literal neighbors, pushed onto the streets.

Here we see a systemic denial of the truth and simultaneously an easy answer. “If we make it hard for these folks to live here, then they’ll just get on another bus!” That works if you assume people are maliciously being transited, but the reality that people fall into homelessness and poverty within our own community… That opens up responsibility on our part, on the community’s part, in order to make sure we’re doing all we can to care for one another.

The wider the circle, the more complicated the narrative becomes. When a Pandemic ravages the world it is easy to say, “It isn’t that bad!” or “I bet those people caused it!” When floods wipe out communities it is easier to say, “Those folks deserved it!” or “The planes caused it!” than to accept that disasters happen, and in preparation and execution to counter them, mistakes happen.

We are all participants in narratives: national, local, and personal. We will always pick narratives that make us have the least amount of culpability and discomfort with the way the world works around us is. At least, we will until we choose to pursue truth. Without a commitment to truth I will always assume that I was in the right in an argument, that my worldview is unimpeachable, that the people I disagree with are the root of every problem and the people I agree with have all the easy answers in the world… Unless I choose to search for truth, I will settle for something lesser.

Truth is made up of data and stories. It requires finding accurate reporting and reading through more than one article or report to understand a larger context. It requires meeting people from different groups, places, and perspectives rather than trusting stereotypes or assumptions. Truth is a gestalt of many pieces of life, and not just the pieces we decide are most palatable.

As Christians, we hold the most important truth in the universe in our hands. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is yours to reveal to the world. If we are left at the mercy of the tides of narratives, and not rooted in a true pursuit of truth… Why should anyone believe us? We are just selling another perspective, another narrative, not dealing with truth in the absolute sense of the word.

Truth is furtive. It’s hard to keep alive because it constantly is shifting under our own pressure for it to look more like this or more like that. Worse still, in falsehood we find none of the ambiguity of doubt that truth can cause. Yet, we must remember, “no matter how tender, how exquisite… A lie will remain a lie.”[1] If we wish to serve the God of truth, we must commit ourselves to truly be people of truth. Abandon the notions you have created to prop up your own desires, egos, and worldviews – embrace the messy things of this life, and find that God is holding a mop and bucket for those who wish to acknowledge the mess. – amen.

[1] Toshifumi Nabeshima. Dark Souls II. V. 1.10. Bandai Namco. PC. 2011

Sermon 08/10/2025 – That Better Country

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible…

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance, and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith, with Sarah’s involvement, he received power of procreation, even though he was too old, because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, “as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.”

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better homeland, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.

Sermon Text

Faith and Hope are two sides of the same coin. Through our faith in God, we are convinced that the things we do not presently see are nonetheless real and forthcoming. When we believe that God is active and that salvation is real, then we naturally believe that its benefits and consequences are likewise real and active. Faith is not a basic admittance of belief in something, but a firm stance we come through convincement – by God and through other faithful people – to the truth of our religion.

While some people are squeamish about the use of the term “religion,”, I am  not. Religion is, broadly speaking, any of the ways that we conduct ourselves in this life toward something bigger than ourselves. Whether we express our religious convictions in a legalistic way or with an eye toward a faith that frees us is a matter of choice. Religion is, therefore, not the end of our faith, but the way in which we express faith. The outpouring of what we believe into what we do, that is the essence of Christianity.

Faith is inseparably linked to hope, the anticipation of something unseen and yet promised. When we live out a life of faith, we do so because we believe that God is honest in projecting a future for us that is better than our current one. This “better country,” is not a temporal reality, but a spiritual and eschatological one. In the present age we are given assurance and strength to face the broken world around us. In the age to come all promises are fulfilled and all troubles cease. In the time between we live a life that makes the hope that our faith points toward break out in intermittent flashes. In our honoring of God’s covenant through faith in and Christ and our service to one another, we make the Kingdom of Heaven exist in the now, even as we wait for its fulfillment at the end of time.

As we talked about last week, the cycles of life can make it difficult to have hope. We get lost in the day-to-day hustle and bustle as well as the legitimate hardships that come from disease, and death, and greed. The systemic and personal evils of this world are such that I never begrudge a person who says they have struggled to find or keep it because of questions about the problem of evil. If I did not have a personal experience of Christ, I do not think that I would be able to come to faith naturally. Not raised in the Church, not brought up with a full understanding of who God is and what Christ reveals about God, I would have easily let my cynicism take me down the road of unbelief.

The thing that allows us to exist as people of faith is simply that we have met God. In our worship and our sacrament in our scripture and in our prayer, we have come again and again to the well of eternal life and found that its waters do not dry up. The only reason we can have faith is because of an act of God, through the person of Christ, and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Apart from these gifts of grace, we would not be able to look at this world with the hope that we carry. Faith is a belief, begun by convincement, that God means what God says. Without the blessing of God’s presence at the outset, we would never find our way to faith at all.

The stories in Genesis, which the author of Hebrews pulls upon in describing faith, shed light upon the messiness of belief and the foundational need for God’s presence to produce it. Abraham went into Canaan after God called him to do so. He also fled into Egypt at the first sign of danger. Isaac was born to Sarah and Abraham, but only after they got tired of waiting and forced a slave to carry a child in her place. They answered the call in faith, but they also frequently ran into a situation that challenged that faith. Most importantly for our own stumbling walk toward God’s promises, they frequently met that challenge and failed to act as they ought.

Whether in fleeing Canaan, or in first involving and then chasing away Hagar and her child, Abraham sinned abundantly in his pursuit of God’s covenant. Yet, through him a blessing was shared with the earth. The culmination of Abraham’s work was the person of Christ born from his descendants and out of Heaven. The savior of the whole earth, even of the whole creation, was at the end of a long road of mistake after mistake, and yet Abraham held on in the midst of his failings, trusting that something better was coming down the road.

In our own life, there are many times we encounter challenges that make us question our faith. I think we would be delusional if we did not look at the suffering in this world and not have the question of, “Why?” creep into our mouths. Someday we’ll look at Job and how God blessed his interrogation of divine mercy, but that book gives us a clear message – faith is not diminished through questions, but enhanced. We cannot be convinced of God’s goodness unless we look at God in the face, unless we ask “Why?” and “How long?” and “What are you doing?” To meet God is to meet with the known and the unknowable. To know God is to grow in understanding the hope that hides beyond the horizon of each dark day.

I find it hard to talk about Hope without quoting Emily Dickinson:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers
– That perches in the soul
– And sings the tune without the words
– And never stops – at all,

When we find our hope in Christ, it is not always a loud and triumphant thing. Like Abraham, it meets us in the midst of deep darkness and unknowing. It sings a tune we do not know the words of, but that we can follow faithfully as the beat echoes in our chest. We go forward to live the life we do, so that we might teach the tune to those we meet. In kindness shown to others and in hard lessons of love we have learned and in an endless march toward that better country we have seen only in dreams and deepest prayers, in all these things we proclaim our hope through faith. Listen to the song of Hope within you today and let that song bring you closer to home. – Amen.

Sermon 08/03/2025 – Real Exhaustion

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Ecclesiastes 1:2-14

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down and hurries to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow. All things are wearisome, more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has already been in the ages before us. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.

I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to humans to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun, and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

Sermon Text

Mundanity is a killer. The sun comes up and goes down, the laundry always needs done, and the weekend ends just as soon as it begins. The ebb and flow of time leaves us reeling. How do we stop ourselves from being consumed by the endless repetition of the same old thing? Novelty is only temporary and the newest thing will always become old given enough time. The sunshine, the rain, the coming and going seasons, all can just be a bit overwhelming sometimes.

You may be saying that this is a strange way to look at the coming and going of things. If you read further in Ecclesiastes, for example, you come to a point in which the Teacher tells us that there is a season for everything under the sun. There’s a time to mourn and a time to dance, there’s a time to build and a time to tear down, a time to gather stones and a time to throw away stones. It’s all very poetic, all very beautiful, The Byrds even sang about it. However, at the end of it all, that passage is part of the ongoing theme in the book of Ecclesiastes. The succession of one season, to another, to another is an irritation, not a consolation.

This month I would like for us to take some time to look at several places in scripture that tell us about the world as it is – fundamentally broken – and also what they tell us about what the world can be. As we go through, I’m not going to hesitate to name the broken ways that we experience the world now. I’m not gonna leave you without hope each Sunday, don’t you worry, but I think we can only truly understand what the Gospel means to us if we look at the world now and draw conclusions from that about what work Christ is really undertaking in this world. Today we do that by looking at the book of Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books in all of scripture, to talk about what this world can do to really exhaust us.

As we consider the book of Ecclesiastes, it reads as an honest assessments of ourselves and the world we live in. Admit it to yourself and find yourself freed by the admission that sometimes you’re tired of the way things are. It doesn’t have to be a profound realization, it doesn’t even have to be something that affects your life very often. The world is not the way it should be and it manifests in one-thousand tiny ways that makes us aware of that imperfection. The snide comment that we make towards the people we love that becomes a source of guilt in our heart. The offhanded comment someone else makes about us that we sit and think about and agonize over day after day wondering what they really meant. The seasonal bronchitis that rests in our lungs or the return from remission of one disease or another deep in our bones and in our flesh. The patterns of this life are not always a constant entering into something pleasant. Sometimes we take a step forward and find that our path is quite a rocky one.

Throughout the book of Ecclesiastes, the Teacher seeks to find some way to understand how to live in this imperfect world. We’re told that he tried literally everything he could think of. He tried womanizing, he tried drinking, he tried pouring himself into work. Any distraction, any vice, it was worth it in his mind to give it a go. Their conclusion is telling: every last bit of it was useless. “Vanity of vanities,” is the way that this is usually translated. Other translation put it as “Useless! Useless!” However, in my mind the best example of a translation comes out of Robert Alter, who puts forward the translation as “Merest Breath!” The Hebrew gives the impression of a breath breathed out early in the morning, the last bit of vapor fading away… That is how the Teacher viewed his journey for purpose.

 More than just dealing with the troubles of life in the present moment, the Teacher looks beyond his life. Everything he worked on will be handed down to a relative and he has no idea if they will do a good job. He could become rich and comfortable one hundred times over, but he would be unable to take it with him when he died. Everything terminated the same way for everyone, the evil who lived far too long, the good who die far too young, are all gathered together into the same ground. Death is the only ending to the long succession of exhausting cycles we are trapped in.

This, people of God, is the world as we know it. Now, here I could do a really easy thing and turn this around in a few words. “God shows us the world as it could be! The resurrection changes all that!” And I would be right to say it. However, I do not think that you or I would be completely satisfied with so quick an answer. We need better answers than, “mysterious ways,” and “it will be better by and bye,” we need to actually wrestle with the brokenness of the world. If we are going to say the Gospel makes a difference, we need to talk about what the Gospel does to change these things! There is hope for this world, and that hope is in Jesus Christ, but it will take us the rest of this month to even start to address just how Christ gives us freedom from the drudgery of this world.

If I can spoil the ending of Ecclesiastes for you, though, I can say that the Teacher comes to two simple conclusions. Firstly, that we should live each day in the knowledge that we only have today as a guarantee, and only have one life to live on this side of eternity. Do not focus on “legacy,” or career to the detriment of enjoying this life and the people you have around you in it. Do not chase a hedonistic lifestyle of getting whatever you want, whenever you want it either, extremes are usually bad. No, instead we should all be willing to say, “My time on earth is limited. I will take none of my money with me when I am gone, my resume shall not go before me in the grave. I have today to do what it right, to care for those around me… That is more than enough.

Secondly, the Teacher decides that of everything he did, only his commitment to God really mattered. We cannot regret time we spend in prayer or in worship. We cannot regret service to those around us done for love of God and neighbor. We cannot regret the things which God has placed in front of us, because those things alone have any true lasting power. Through God, the mundane is made into something holy. G.K. Chesterton puts it well, “God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”[1]

As we speak of the mundane being made holy, we must turn our minds to the meal we are about to share. If you are like me and get tired of this world’s many problems and the relentless ebb and flow of time, then this table is here to give you strength. Christ came into the midst of this world’s mess, not standing from far off and yelling platitudes at us, but taking on the same troubles we faced. Christ drank deep of the mundane troubles of this world, took on the pain of disease and injury, lost friends and family, and even died at the convergence of all these struggles. In death, in the fullness of solidarity, Christ secured his right to rise again, and lift all of humanity with him.

Today, we have mostly stated a problem. We take up this spiritual food and drink to continue on in the midst of that problem. Yet, I believe, and I hope you do too, that by the end of this month, we will not find life to be “mere breath,” but so much fuller and worth living than that. – Amen.

[1] G.K. Chesteron. “The Ethics of Elfland,” in Orthodoxy. (John Lane ; The Bodley Head, Limited. 1926.) 107

Rewriting Babel – 06/08/2025

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Torah Lesson                                                                    Genesis 11:1-9

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” 

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Sermon Text

Today is the day of the Pentecost. We commemorate when the church was truly born through the visitation of God’s spirit upon them and the emergence of different languages in their midst. Traditionally we would read the story out of Acts in which each of the disciples found themselves speaking in languages they did not know and proclaiming the gospel to a long list of very hard to pronounce peoples and nations. However, this year, I think it is necessary for us to look at the text that I believe Acts is inspired by. We look to the language and the narrativization of that event to truly understand what we are being told happened when God sent the Spirit into the Church.

Long, long ago, we are given two stories for how the languages of the world developed. In Genesis 10, we are told that after the flood, as Noah and his sons went to different corners of the earth, the people of the world naturally spread apart and over time developed different languages and ways of being. This is the kind of understanding of how culture and language developed that we see in the social sciences as well. Over time people scattered from their origins in sub-Saharan Africa, all across the earth, taking with them bits of culture that changed across the wide breadth of the earth. In Genesis 10, the Table of Nations that we are given tells a story of how large our human family is – all of us connected, all of us tied together by our shared lineage, and yet separated by space-time and language.

Like much of Genesis, however, there are two different versions of this story. While one tells a very natural story of how people grew apart over time, the other story puts much more intentionality to why God would choose that humanity needed to spread apart. As we read in Genesis 11, we are given an episode out of human history that makes the sudden spreading of people across the world a matter of morality. In the early parts of Genesis, we see again and again the way that people not only go foul of what God wishes, but actively seek to cause harm to God, and to God’s creation, and to each other.

As soon as humanity leaves the garden of Eden, Cain kills Abel and in that killing secures a legacy of violence within humanity. In the time of Noah, we’re told that humanity is so violent that God must send a flood to reset the world as it is known just so that there is a chance for the people to survive through Noah and his family. However, Noah and his family, being human, are still capable of sin. Ham, one of his children, sins against his father, resulting in his sons, Cannan being cursed. Humanity regardless of anything that happened before this point begins to develop their old habits again. Slowly, but surely, everyone comes together and works out this idea that if they can work together they could build a tower that could reach up to heaven.

In art and in our imagination, we imagine this as some great building, but from historical records we know that the largest of the ziggurats in the ancient world were no more than four or five stories. The massive ziggurat that would have been understood by the exilic community of Jews was only 10 stories tall, still not this massive building that would reach up to the heavens. The issue was not actually whether or not the building was giant, it wasn’t even really the intent of the people to reach up to heaven, instead it was simply the potential for these people to work together for any purpose that God decided was worth scattering their language and confounding their tongues.

Looking at the brokenness of humanity, God decided that it was better to separate us to keep us from conspiring again and again. The evil that we had perpetrated in the past and the time of Noah would only be made stronger by our newfound ability to build, to innovate, to keep reaching towards things beyond ourselves. Even in our modern world, the way that humanity comes together is often not for the good of one another but for evil. For every creation that comes about for the good of humanity there are two or three that are built only for greed or for death or for evil. In our own time, our own attempt to get into the heavens, the rocket technology that we continue to use for the limited space exploration that we are capable of, was all born out of a desire to create better rockets for weapons of war. Humanity in the modern age still comes together for evil. We are still is capable of so much destruction.

Yet, what we are given in the Pentecost is a promise that this does not need to be what we come together for. God gives, on the Pentecost, the ability for people to come together and hear of Christ. To come and to hear the instructions that God gives so that they are able to truly become part of a Kingdom that is bigger than the individual nations that they had been a part of. From the time of Babel to the time of Christ humanity, had come together again and again for the purposes of war and evil and trouble. Now in the Kingdom that Christ had initiated through his life death and resurrection a new era was promised, and in this era it was possible for people to come together not just to further their own selfish desire but to seek the good of one another.

The church was not immune from the troubles of becoming large and powerful and full of sin. Within just two chapters of this amazing Pentecost moment, we read about the fact that the church began to discriminate based on the language that people spoke forgetting the purpose of this Pentecost moment. Yet this Kingdom was not disturbed by the failure of its physical body from acting as it needed to. The Spirit still rose up leaders to correct this mistake to change the course of the church and to send it into a better future. We today, recipients of that same Spirit, can lean into or go against the work that God has put within us to send us forward into a better tomorrow.

As we will talk about more in these last two Sundays that I have with you, the Church is constantly discovering the ways that we put up barriers between ourselves and our neighbors. This impulse works against the core of what God’s Spirit is doing. While there was a day in which God said it was better for humanity to be scattered lest they commit evil, that was a punishment and not a goal. The goal of God’s work in the world has always been to reunite all of humanity under the banner of Christ and the pursuit of goodness. Yet, if we search our hearts today, I bet we would find that there is reticence within ourselves to embrace so broad a view of God’s Kingdom.

Maybe it’s the priority of your own country over others or of your own people over others. Maybe you have decided that everyone politically against you must be the absolute epitome of evil. Maybe you have cast aside anything and everything that goes against the worldview that you’ve created for yourself. Maybe you just have forgotten that you are meant to love and that that love has to manifest for every person created by God and not just the ones that fit into the box we have said is lovable. In the Pentecost, God wanted to make clear that Babel was a punishment and that punishment was not the goal.

God is actively rewriting Babel, we do not have to be people who are separate and who push against each other. Likewise, we do not have to come together only to do harm to further our wants above anyone else’s. We have the option through the spirit of God to create a world modeled after the Kingdom which was started before the foundations of the earth and sealed through the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God wants to take you and make you the pencil that will rewrite this world’s story and see things differently tomorrow than they are today. Let the Spirit fall upon you and let you know now and forever that God is the God of all peoples, nations, races, and creeds and that God wishes for all to sit and eat at the table which is prepared for them. Let us call together the people of this earth that our sin forced apart. – Amen.

Sermon 04/20/2025 – A Risen Christ

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Gospel Lesson                                                                   Luke 24:1-12

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.”

Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

Sermon Text

There are three things that makes Christianity valid, three things we cannot ever stray from believing or understanding. That Christ came to live among us, that Christ died a human death on a cross, and that Christ rose into glory that we all might join him in his victory over death. While we can think differently on many aspects of faith, worship, and religion at large – these are the unalienable precepts we cannot escape. It is in this we find our hope, upon this all creeds are founded, and from this that we know that truth that “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

On a chilly morning long ago, as the stink of death had fully infected a stone tomb set into the hillside, light and life exploded into the world in a way it never had before. For the first time a dead person was not only raised, but resurrected, glorified in their assumption of true life. This “first fruit,” was not just a normal human, but the perfect Word of God, perfectly united to humanity, who lived and died and rose again for our sake. All flesh was now redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ and all people could know the resurrection that came from his liberation of us all from Sin. The world would never be the same.

While choirs of angels were required to mark the birth of Christ into the world, as his glory had been hidden in the fragile gift of a baby, only one angel was needed to proclaim his resurrection. Almost glibly, the celestial messenger looked down on the disciples and asked a simple question, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Though they had been told Christ would need to die, and that Christ would rise again, that belief in the mind had not translated to a belief in the heart. Only faced with the reality of an empty tomb and of an inhumane, glorious creature proclaiming what had happened, could they begin to see that Christ meant what he said when he claimed he would die, but death would not hold him.

We are removed now from this event by about 2000 years of history. Movements have come and gone, empires risen and fallen, and yet one truth remains. Christ is risen, Christ is alive, and Christ invites us to come and feast at the table of God’s grace and be renewed ourselves. Light from Light eternal, Christ was eternally present with God and was God. Born of a Virgin, Christ was fully human and faced all troubles and pains we have faced. Dying as a criminal, Christ took on complete solidarity with our weakness and with our guilt. Rising in glory, Christ shows us a glimpse of what our life will be like in the World to Come.

I cannot imagine what it was like for the disciples to come to that tomb, filled with the dread of their master’s stolen body, his defiled tomb, only to be met with the bizarre revelation that Hope came from that empty tomb – not despair. As they ran, how horrible it must have been to think about all that could be happening with the displaced body. As they looked in the tomb, how wondrous it must have been to consider that what the first visitors to the tomb, the women who came to attend to Christ, had said was true.

I cannot speak to the emotion that morning would have carried when it was first known, but I can speak to what it can give us now. Hope – that the brokenness of our world and the evil in our hearts and the hearts of others cannot win. Faith – in the resurrection that will bring all flesh before the throne of God someday. Love – the transformative actions given to us by Christ, that we may grow into Christ’s image and make this world into a foretaste of the World to Come. When we gather today, we do not just celebrate a holiday or a historic event, we celebrate that there is still a reason to hold tight to faith, to hope, and to love, even in the tumultuous world we are a part of today.

Let us remember, and let us celebrate. Christ is Risen. Christ is Risen Indeed. Hallelujah, hallelujah – Amen.

Sermon 04/13/2025 – Celebrating Emptiness

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Epistle Lesson                                                         Philippians 2:5-11

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus:

who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.

Therefore God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Sermon Text

 Traditionally, Churches will observe one or two things on Palm Sunday. The Liturgy of the Palms, where we wave our branches and remember when the crowds outside Jerusalem did the same, or the Liturgy of the Passion, where we recount the crucifixion in preparation for the Easter celebration we all will partake in next week. The difference in service is usually decided by whether or not the Church has Holy Week services – if you have Good Friday service, why have two services recounting the crucifixion in one week? Today though, I’d like to do something like splitting the difference. We remember the celebration of Palm Sunday, we do so looking ahead to the crucifixion, and we do so by remembering just what Jesus’s entire work upon the earth was about.

We start at the beginning, or lack thereof. There was never a time when Christ was not. You and I are finite in our existence, our soul forming sometime in the process of our coming into being or being born. There was a time when you were not and I were not, but there was never a time, unbelievable as that seems, where there was not The Son of God, the only Word of the Father, existing alongside the other members of the Godhead in perfect unity. Before the first word was uttered, before the big bang went from a singularity to the entirety of being, here was the oneness of the Divine. Christ always was, and would have existed eternally in the infinitely expansive sublimity of God’s presence within the Godhead.

The full complexity of God’s pre-creationary existence was made clearer when God first created this universe we live in. Suddenly, there was a contrast, the finite and definite creation contrasted with the infinite and sundry persons of God. Father, Son, and Spirit knew no limits but every element and piece of creation – from the sky above to the waters below – had boundaries and limits all around.

Christ still could exist without limitation, could still experience the infinite existence he had always known. Yet, something greater than that was coming, something greater than the perfect presence of the Godhead or the adoration of angels or the infinite span of eternity. The greatest thing that Christ could or would ever do was found – not in further exaltation – but in deliberate, intentional, and complete humiliation. The infinite God of the universe, took on an impossibly smaller form, gave up the benefits of divinity – though never giving up divinity itself – all for the chance to reconcile the creation God loved so much.

We cannot conceive the sacrifice Christ made, even before the cross, in his taking on human form. In becoming a human being, the fullness of Christ’s divinity suddenly had limitations. There was a stopping point to his being – he had hands and feet, organs and dimensions. His eyes could only see so far and his ears hear so much. Cold could chill him, heat could exhaust him, and the first few minutes of every day would greet him with aches and pains just like they greet anyone else on earth.

The one who “does not faint or grow weary,” now had to rest.[1] His perfect and spiritual substance, now united to flesh could get sick – he had to cut teeth and fight fevers. Every rock he slept on would press into his back as a source of dull pain, every cut on his foot would rub against his sandal and be made raw, every pain and every trouble of humanity came his way. The Perfect Son of God, tempted at every step, still never sinned. In this alone, Christ was different from us in his humanity – that he never strayed from his Father’s will. Yet, in all other things, the God who never needed to feel anything negative in all of eternity, chose to take it all on, even unto death, even death on a cross.

Palm Sunday is a day we remember people understanding, even for a moment, who Jesus was. The rich quaked in fear in the city, while the poor country folk celebrated in the streets. Palms were waved that would not be taken up in Christ’s presence till the reign of God is fully inaugurated at the end of time. The King of all Creation, who had seen unspeakable creatures worship him in eternity past, now accepted the simple praise of human beings running naked in a filthy street. A celebration half-hearted in its adoration, not knowing who Christ fully was or what was about to happen – an echo of something far in the past and far still in the future.

Today we remember that celebrating what Christ did is a celebration of emptiness. In Greek, Christ’s setting aside of the benefits of his divinity is called his, “Kenosis.” A scooping out of who he was, just so that he could fully take on humanity, and not only that but the poorest and most destitute and most troubled experience of humanity he could face. Jesus faced all this, not for his own good, but out of devotion to his Father and love for his creation.

It is because of this humility, because of this willingness to be humiliated, that Christ holds the status he holds in our hearts today. Still fully human, though raised and perfected in glory, Jesus is now the perfect and fullest demonstration of both God and humanity in one single entity. In Heaven there sits a human person, seated at the right hand of the Father as he had previously only done in Spirit. Christ the Lord, raised and given the name which is above all other names, because though he was fully God and had all the benefits thereof, he was willing to shed it all for the good of those he loved.

Today we wave our palms and cry out our praises, but we do so with the knowledge that what we celebrate was horrific for the one who receives our praises. The heartbreak of the Last Supper, the horror of the Crucifixion, all await us before we can step into the resurrection. Today, though we celebrate, let us do so fully aware of what is happening in front of us. – Amen.

[1] Isaiah 40:31

Sermon 04/06/2025 – Worship and Service

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

John 12:1-8

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 

But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

Sermon Text

One of the more interesting episodes in scripture is the one which we just heard out of the Gospel of John. Jesus, having come to Bethany ahead of his crucifixion, is sitting at the table with his disciples. Suddenly, Mary sister of Martha comes in and anoints his feet with expensive perfume, wiping the excess with her hair. Judas objects, saying that they money used for this could have been used to help the poor (a claim John doubts was meant earnestly.) Jesus assures Judas that this was the right thing to do, that as Jesus goes to die he should be prepared for burial – and that Judas should not worry, “you always have the poor with you.”

To my mind, this is the only time we see Jesus seemingly discourage something being given to those in need. When the disciples question his giving before, he always waves them away and goes back to what he is doing. Yet here, at the end of his earthly ministry, he tells them that this time the money does not have to go to the poor. More than that, Jesus seems to address poverty as inevitable, a strange vision for the world coming from its savior. What are we to do, then, with a Messiah who leaves us with so many questions all at once?

The journey we take should begin with the context of how Jesus’s other teachings address how his earthly ministry differs from the ministry of the Church. Afterall, Jesus was upfront with his disciples that things would change when he had ascended into Heaven, they would not always have him physically and directly in front of them to tell them what to do or how to be. Naturally, this means that after Christ rose from the dead and then ascended into Heaven, the disciples would do things differently than they had before. Pray, the eucharist, all manner of acts of worship and service, would alter the live of those first few believers.

The most direct comparison between Christ’s words about the poor and his wider teachings comes in his words about fasting. Following the complaints of his religious rivals that his disciples do not fast like they do, Jesus explains that fasting is indeed holy and good, but that now was not the time for it. “When the bridegroom is here,” fasting was not necessary. In other words, during Christ’s earthly mission, his disciples did not need to escape distraction to see him. Only after he was no longer physically present would such a thing be required.

In the same way, Jesus seems here to not be giving us an excuse to frivolously spend our money in the Church or for “worship,” of God, but is instead speaking to an aspect of ministry unique to his time on earth. The disciples only had a few more precious hours with him, and they would spend most of that time sleeping or hiding. Mary alone seemed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, offering a personal gift to Jesus and showering him with worship while she had the chance. The gift of nard, the wiping of Christ’s feet clean with her hair, these were gifts given to a friend, a teacher, a savior and God, that she would soon no longer see face to face.

Jesus was not callously lauding comfort as more important that care for the poor, but speaking to the particular chance that was afforded to his disciples as they sat awaiting his final days. “The poor are always with you,” was not an attempt by Christ to legitimize poverty either, but a statement of the evils of humanity and the inequality they produce, always having victims.

In Christ’s time there was not an “economic system,” in a philosophic sense. Trade was still mostly by barter, and while the coinage of the empire allowed for standardized trade it did not reflect a radical shift in ideals about how business exists. In our modern era we throw around words like “capitalism,” “socialism,” “communism,” “distributism,” and many more to describe our economic ideals. Yet, I tell you this sad fact – not one economic system, ancient, feudal, or ideological has succeeded in erasing poverty. Some work better at it than others, but it does seem that anything other than deliberate community care cannot erase poverty or its consequences. “The poor are always with you,” is not a statement of defeat but of the reality not everyone cares enough about each other to change the way the world is… Not until Christ comes in final victory will we see poverty truly erased.

In that way, we will always have the poor with us, but in a much more important way Christ tells us that the poor are always with us because we owe them our service and our community. Christ does not say, “There will always be poor,” but that “the poor are always with you.” More specifically, Christ speaks to a degree of ownership – the disciples “had,” Christ with them, they had a relationship and not just proximity. The day was soon coming where the disciples would no longer “have Christ,” next to them, and so their attention would need to turn directly to Christ’s presence upon earth, “the poor.”

In Matthew 25, Christ puts forward that only those who care for the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the imprisoned, and the sick will have a place in his Kingdom. A few years ago it was popular to limit this to only apply to people in your Church, but that is not what it says. When Christ calls us to love “the least of these, [his] siblings,” he is speaking of all people who suffer in this world as it is. All of them are meant to share something with all of us. The Church and the poor, they can never and should never be separated. As long as we wait for Christ, we are to be in community with them.

There is a time for worship of God, for piety to overcome the need to serve others. It lasts for about an hour on Sunday mornings and it lasts when we take a moment away to pray or to give praise or to study scripture. At all other times, service and care for others is more important than any other aspect of our faith. “There is no holiness, but social holiness,” and unless we can live our lives together, to overcome the many problems of this world, we will be no better than Judas. For Judas claimed to love the poor and yet only loved himself, how greater is our sin if we claim to love Christ but deny the poor he calls us to love. Love one another, serve one another, for there is no greater worship than this. – Amen.

Sermon 03/30/2025 – An Icon of Sin

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

2 Corinthians 5:16-21

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we no longer know him in that way. 

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 

So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Sermon Text

 Last week we looked at the way that our images of Christ impact our Christian walk. If we engage with Christ as anything but who Christ truly is, the perfect incarnate Word of God, then we miss out on imitating that same God in our walk to perfection. There is another way in which Christ acts as an image, however, or more properly how Christ acted as an image. Christ, despite living without sin and living perfectly from eternity to eternity, became the perfect image of human sin, so that humanity might aspire to the perfection of his divinity.

That language is too technical though. We could dig into hamartiology (the study of Sin,) for years and not come any closer to the central and simple truth of what Christ was able to accomplish for us in his death. The work of the Cross, a perfect sacrifice offered once and for all, was the moment that redemption and resurrection became possible for humanity. Yet, what does it mean for Christ to have “become sin?” Furthermore, what about dying as this image of Sin was means that we are saved by Christ’s work in the first place?

The general way we talk about Christ’s saving work is with the moniker of “atonement theory.” We use this large net because it covers all the different ways that people talk about Christ’s work to save us. You see, when you have something as major as Christ’s death on the cross and subsequent resurrection, no one way of talking about it is enough. Most people have a singular explanation that they focus on when they talk about how Christ saved us but each has a little bit of the picture within their vision of Christ’s work. Imagine you have a bunch of clear projection papers, each with a few lines drawn on them. Each one you stack on top of the other will give you a little bit more of the picture, and all of them will complete the picture. In the same way, we talk about God by stacking images of God on top of each other until we can see who God is, and more often who God is not.

Christ’s becoming sin on our behalf is ultimately a completion of his work in the incarnation. By becoming human, Christ experienced everything we as humans experience: sickness, tiredness, temptation, hunger, thirst, pain, and even death. The only thing Christ never experienced was sin itself. In becoming fully human, Christ took on all of humanity. In going to the Cross, he took on the penalty for all of humanity’s sin, and in his death therefore removed the punishment from the rest of humanity. Though flesh may die still, the soul could be freed and the resurrection that Christ himself would take part in was promised to all others who had faith in that same resurrection.

The thing that most people disagree with is in what way Christ “became sin.” Some put forward that Jesus, like the scapegoat of ages past, literally became filled with the sins of all humanity as he hung on the cross. Therefore, all sin died with him on the cross. Catholic doctrine asserts that the agony he felt in Gethsemane came from him looking ahead and seeing all of human sin, and still choosing to take it upon himself. Others see it simply as Christ, though innocent, died for our sins and therefore “became sin,” in the sense of taking punishment on despite having none of the spiritual taint of Sin within him. The difference in those two ideas is subtle, but it does lead to some interesting nuance in how we talk about Christ’s death.

I remember when I was at a funeral once, there was a plant in the crowd. Very strange to orchestrate a funeral like that, but so it goes. The minister leading the service “noticed,” another minister in the crowd and asked him to pray to close out the service. “Lord Jesus, we thank you for your mercy and for you substitutionary death upon the cross…” He began. Substitutionary here means that Jesus died in our place, took on the punishment meant for us, and so satisfied God’s wrath in his death. This idea is reflected in Hebrews where it speaks of God seeing Christ’s righteousness and not our sin, when God looks upon us.

The problem with substitutionary language is that, while it is true Christ died in our place, if we leave it only at that – where do we stand now? Between the life material and the life eternal, there has to be something more to what Christ did for us. Did Jesus die to free us from the consequence of Sin, or did Christ die to fully reconcile us to God? If Christ is just a divine distraction from God’s wrath, then the crucifixion was a singular act with a singular outcome. That, to me, does not reflect the wider narrative of scripture in what Christ did for us.

Christ did indeed die and take on the full consequences of sin, but as our scripture says in dying he became “Sin,” not merely the consequences of that sin but the idea in itself. In dying, Christ destroyed Sin in its entirety, leaving a shell of what the evil had been before. As John Wesley put it, when Christ saves he does not save by “mere deliverance from Hell,” but by completely freeing us from the weight of Sin and from its hold in our life.

A fully regenerated Christian, washed in the water and the blood, filled with the Spirit, has nothing in them that means that must sin. Ignorance or thoughtlessness is the only cause that must necessarily result in sin in our life. All other sin is a consequence directly of our habits that engrain sin within us, our conscious choice to sin despite knowing better, or our brokenness misleading us into acting in sin rather than facing our trouble directly. We who are saved do not sin out of powerlessness, we sin because we have allowed sin to be our nature even though sin was destroyed once and for all on a hill far away.

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, he paints the image better than most. In the poem, after Satan decides to go to Eden and tempt Adam and Eve, he approaches the gates of Hell which are guarded by Sin and her horrible child Death. The gates of Hell are sealed, not from the outside, but the inside. Satan, Milton puts forward, chose his imprisonment, and in the same way we decide again and again to submit to sin rather than be free in Christ.

Christ lived a life of perfection, not only as a highlight of God’s goodness, but to demonstrate to us what was possible once we were freed from Sin. Christ was fully human, inclined to the same temptations and weaknesses we are, and yet Christ overcame sin in maintain his perfection of will as a human and as God. When Christ took on sin – literally or consequentially – he took on every aspect of it. He broke the chains that had held us forever in bondage, and offered us the key again and again through his grace. In descending to the dead, Christ suffered the fate of all who taste sin, proclaiming the Gospel even in the grave. In rising again, Christ was forever victorious over death – the ultimate consequence of sin.

The Gates of Hell were forever taken off their hinges. The vice grip that death had on humanity was shattered and the beast reduced to a whelpling. Satan was crushed and all his minions reduced to shades in a kingdom of shades. Christ, the Icon of Sin in death, is now the eternal emblem of God’s grace, power, and mercy – perfected humanity forever wed to the perfection of Godhead. All things began, and found their natural end and purpose through Christ’s journey to the cross and from the grave.

Whether we talk in terms of substitution or moral exemplars, in Christus Victor or ransom, Christ died for our sins. Christ in that death took on Sin in a substantial and real way. That taking on of our sin allowed for us to be freed from all of Sin’s power in our life. We can, in other words, be perfected, and Christ gladly will lead us toward that perfection if we willingly submit to the work Christ sets before us. Having been redeemed, justified, saved through Christ’s work on the cross – Christ now offers us the Spirit and the Church, and asks that we live so that we may know true abundance. Abundance of love, or mercy, of holiness… Life is born out of death, because Christ changed everything… Praise God, praise God, praise God! – Amen.