"Making Final Arrangements" Matt. 17.1-9, Transfiguration A, Feb. ‘20

1.         Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Amen.  The message from God’s Word this Sunday of the Transfiguration of our Lord is taken from Matthew 17:1-9 and is entitled, “Making Final Arrangements,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.  Let us pray:  Gracious Heavenly Father, the Christian church throughout the world is about to enter into the holy season of Lent. Before we journey with Your Son Jesus Christ into His passion, give us a glimpse of His glory. Give us, O Lord, some encouragement from the mountaintop as we walk through the valley of the shadow of this world's sorrows. Give us the strength that comes from tying our lives to eternal hope that is ours in the life, death and victorious resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord, in whose strong name we pray. Amen.

2.         When my mother in law died, I assisted my wife and her family to make arrangements for her burial and now we are doing that for her brother, who was just called home to heavenly rest. Those of you that have lost loved ones have made arrangements for their funerals in the midst of your sorrow. That's the role of family -- to make arrangements. But there are at least three people in the history of the human race whose family didn't make the arrangements. God did. Let me briefly share with you these three great stories. They can all be found in the Old Testament.

3.         The first is a story about a man named Enoch who lived before the days of Noah in the Old Testament. He lived a total of 365 years and we are told he walked with God. That's what Enoch was famous for. The Bible says he walked with God. That's not so unique by itself. After all, many people through the ages have walked with God.  But what makes Enoch unique is that the Bible says he didn't see death, but simply "God took him." It's almost like they were out walking one day and walked further than they had ever walked before. God said to Enoch, "You know, you're closer to My home than we are to yours. Why don't you just come home with Me?" And God took him home. "And Enoch was no more" the Bible says. God made the arrangements for his farewell. And just like that, Enoch was in heaven. You can read about it in Genesis 5 and Hebrews 11. 

4.         The second man God made final arrangements for was Elijah, the great prophet of God in the Old Testament who had been so faithful in his defense of the Lord. On one occasion on Mt. Carmel, he had a face off with 450 prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18). He called upon the Lord's mighty power and He defeated them all. How's that for odds?  450 to one. Only one had God on His side.  Shortly after that incident Elijah appointed his successor prophet Elisha. Elijah asked Elisha what last request he might have and Elisha asked for a double share of the spirit of Elijah. He wanted to be as bold for the Lord as his mentor. As they walked along, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind straight into heaven (2 Kings 2). Like Enoch, Elijah's earthly farewell and arrangements were handled by God. 

5.         The third Old Testament hero that has a special end is Moses -- the great deliverer of the nation of Israel.  You’ve probably seen the great Hollywood movie "The Ten Commandments" or the animated special "The Prince of Egypt." If you have, you know the story of this man of God. But when his life was near the end, the story takes an interesting turn. Moses and the people of Israel had wandered for 40 years in the wilderness and were finally camped at the edge of the long awaited promised land. But before they went, the Lord took Moses to the top of Mt. Nebo and let Moses see a glimpse of the land he had given his life for.
6.         The Lord wanted Moses to see it from a distance, but Moses was not going to cross the Jordan into that promised land. The Lord had a far better promised land in mind for Moses. So, the Bible tells us:  "And Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there on Mt. Nebo. The Lord buried him and to this day no one knows where his grave is." (Deut. 34:5-6) Moses was 120 years old.  God made the final arrangements for Enoch. God made the final arrangements for Elijah and He made the final arrangements for Moses. As a matter of fact, in the little book of Jude in the New Testament it says the Archangel Michael and the devil fought over Moses' body. You know full well who is going to win that fight. And so Christian tradition says Moses' body went straight to heaven and nobody will ever find his grave. 

7.         Now those are the three great stories I wanted to share with you. Three stories about how God made the final arrangements for Enoch, Elijah and Moses. I share these stories with you because they all lead to another great story.  In the New Testament, just before Jesus goes to Jerusalem for the last time to give His life for the sins of all humanity, Jesus goes up a mountain and takes three of His disciples, Peter, James and John. On that New Testament mountain, Jesus gives these three disciples a glimpse of His glory as He is transfigured. That is, His figure changed. It became brilliant with light and glory, and there standing with Jesus in glory was -- guess who? Elijah and Moses standing with Jesus. With Peter, James and John looking on, we are told, "Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus about His departure which He was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem" (Luke 9:31). 

8.         God the Father was about to make arrangements for one more farewell-- His only Son's.  Throughout the Christian church, this coming week begins a season called Lent. It’s ushered in with traditional parties called Mardi Gras -- the world's perversion of an old European tradition called "Fat Tuesday" in which people would eat all the sumptuous foods around the house before Ash Wednesday and before their six weeks of self-denial and fasting began.  Since the Reformation, Lutheran Churches have always read this story of Jesus, Moses and Elijah transfigured on the mountain on the Sunday before Lent starts. Why? For a couple of important reasons. 

9.         First, the disciples were just about finished with their three-year training. They were soon to be on their own. They needed some encouragement for which was to come. That's why the Lord took Peter, James and John and gave them a glimpse of the "glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." That's the way Peter described his experience later when he wrote to the churches. 

10.       Before we go into the season of Lent, we, too, need a glimpse of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. These may be difficult days. They are for many of your neighbors and friends. There is loneliness, depression, and divorce, addiction, abuse, and anxiety. Aren't there times in all our lives when we wish we could go to the mountaintop and get a glimpse of the glory of our God in the face of Jesus Christ just to encourage us?  And the Lord is with us today. It is in the face of Jesus that we can be raised up by faith to get a glimpse of the glory of God. And for Peter, James and John, it was so wonderful on the mountain they wanted to just stay there. But Jesus would say to Peter, "No, we can't stay on this mountain. We must go down to the plain," and we are told, "Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem." 
11.       As Moses was taken to Mt. Nebo to see the Promised Land, Jesus from the Mount of Transfiguration saw your sin and mine. The Christian church observes a Lenten season because of sin. The great prophet Elijah, at one time, wanted to resign as God's prophet. He wasn't perfect. Moses couldn't go into the Promised Land because of his own lack of faith and sin. You, along with everyone, need a Savior from our sin.
12.       We need to come face to face with our failures, if we are ever to be set free. The Bible says, "If you say you have no sin, you deceive yourselves and the truth is not in you. But if you confess your sin, God is faithful and just and will forgive your sin" (1 John 1:8-9).  Before we get a glimpse of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, we need to face our greed and our selfishness; our immorality and bigotry; our lack of faithfulness to God and His Word; and His claim on our lives -- all of our lives. 

13.       But, so many in our land want nothing of Jesus in their lives. They want Jesus out of public places. They want any kind of moralistic judgement away from their freedom to choose. They want Christianity out of politics, out of schools, out of the media. Today's contemporary lifestyle has no room for Jesus -- not in the one night stands, couples living together before marriage, the gambling, immorality, drugs, revenge, gossip, excessive leisure, cheating, and the spiritual arrogance that seeks to find salvation in human achievement. We seek glory, all right, but not in the face of Jesus Christ.

14.       As Jesus looks down from the mount of His transfiguration, He sees nothing but the valley of our failures and just beyond that failure, He sees His cross. We are told He set His face toward Jerusalem to His cross -- there, willingly to take these sins of ours upon Himself. And that's what He and Moses and Elijah talked about that day-that day the Father made arrangements for the death of His Son. 

15.       Here is the Good News for you and me. No one can ever find the grave of Enoch. No one can ever find the grave of Elijah. No one can ever find the grave of Moses. More importantly, the grave of God's Son, Jesus can’t be found today, either. Why? Because it’s empty. The body of God's Son would see no decay. Why? Because He rose victoriously on the third day. The tomb in which they laid His body could not hold Him. He rose in glory and ascended into heaven -- there with Enoch and Moses and Elijah and all the faithful.

16.       But, I have more Good News: the Father has made some final arrangements. He has made them for you. That little glimpse of God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ is what's able to get us through the world's wilderness until we cross over into our "promised land." But until then, as Moses laid his hand on Joshua, and Elijah laid his hand on Elisha, so Jesus lays His hands on you which empowers you to move from this mountain down into the valley of the shadow of death, confident that the Lord walks with us. 

17.       And to this Good News I must call you all to simple child-like repentance, faith, and obedience. Repentance that enables us to change -- to turn around our lives of sin. Faith -- the wonderful gift of the Holy Spirit in our hearts that gives us the assurance of that which we hope for; the confidence in that which we do not see. And, obedience enables us to follow the will of the Lord in our life, and in so doing, we discover meaningful purpose. For us with repentance, unrepentance is impossible. With faith, unbelief is unbelievable, and with obedience, disobedience is unthinkable. Why? For we have seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus. We have been to the mountain of faith and we are encouraged and empowered for our journey through the wilderness. Mother Teresa once said, "You will never know that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you've got." When your final arrangements are made, Jesus is all you'll need. Amen.  The peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting.  Amen.

“Got Milk or Solid Food…” 1 Cor. 3.1-9, Feb. ’20, Epiphany 6A

1.                            Please pray with me.  May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your Sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.   The message from God’s Word today comes from 1 Cor. 3:1-9 and is entitled, ‘Got Milk or Solid Food?” Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

2.                            When you were a child, didn’t it seem to take a long time to grow up? I remember always wanting to be older and bigger than I was. Before I was 10 years old I remember longing to be a teenager. That magical age seemed to be a long way off. Then it came, and I longed to be 16 and have a driver’s license. Then it was 18, so that I would be old enough to vote, and then 21, so that I could be of legal drinking age.  In the same way, have you ever noticed how young children play?   They love to pretend to be adults, whether it’s cowboys, sports, or playing house with dolls.  Likewise there are many in the church who hunger to grow. They desire a deeper awareness of Christ and His truths. They long for a stronger faith and a more meaningful spiritual maturity.

3.                            Just as there are those in church who long to be spiritually mature, there are also those who are spiritually immature.  We often refer to spiritual immaturity as worldliness.  It’s thinking and behaving just like the people of this world, who lack the Holy Spirit’s working in their lives.  This type of thinking may lead to idolizing and following the leaders of the Church more than our Savior Jesus Himself, or that there is jealousy and quarreling among those in the church.  Here in Corinthians Paul says it’s foolish to idolize those who are only servants, when God is the source of all spiritual growth.  What’s even worse is to quarrel over which leader within the church is better than the other.

4.                            Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3:1-5,” ¹But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. ²I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, ³for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? ⁴For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?  ⁵What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each.”  Chapter three begins with Paul scolding the Christians in Corinth since he could speak to them only as infants. He had to feed them with milk and not with solid food, because they couldn’t digest anything stronger. (I Cor. 3:2)  Paul reminds us that God wants us to grow! He wants us to move beyond the elementary stage of milk into the maturity of the meat of God’s Word.

5.                            Paul was writing to a congregation that had divided into factions. The groups had distinguished themselves from each other by an appeal to their “leaders.” You can almost hear them shouting at each other: “I follow Paul! . . . Apollos! . . . Peter! . . . Christ!” That’s why Paul asked them in 1 Cor. Chapter 1, “Is Christ divided?”  Their bickering and their one-upping each other, Paul said, was a result of their immaturity and worldliness.  They were spiritual babies as far as their understanding of the mystery of the Gospel was concerned.

6.                            And yet the situation of the Corinthian Christians forces us to ask ourselves where we are in growing in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ and determine to do something about moving toward maturity in Christ. We can refuse to be content with a “Jesus loves me, this I know . . .” mentality and pursue the Scripture’s teaching further about how God continues to make us righteous in and through His Son our Savior Jesus Christ.   For instance, Jesus’ parables are full of encouragement to growing in our lives as one of His disciples.  Hebrews 5:12-6:3 says, “12… by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.  1Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, 2and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. 3And this we will do if God permits. “

7.                            In 1 Corinthians 3 Paul used two analogies to show the process that God was using to build His Church in Corinth. Both emphasize that while God used apostles and other Church leaders in carrying out the process, they were really only His servants through whose proclamation of His Gospel the Holy Spirit accomplished His saving purpose in people.  1 Cor. 3:6-9 says, “⁶I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. ⁷So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. ⁸He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. ⁹For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.” 

8.                            Notice that Paul’s first analogy is from farming. Paul said that he, as the first to bring the Gospel to them, had planted the seed. Apollos, an eloquent preacher who had come to Corinth after Paul had left, had watered the seed. But, Paul explained, it was God who made the seed grow into what it had become in the lives of the Corinthian Christians.  This was being accomplished through the preaching of Christ and Him crucified among them and through the sacraments of Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  God has produced spiritual growth within you through your parents, pastor, teachers and maybe even your friends with the Spirit’s power.  God has used these people in your lives to tell you the message of Christ and Him crucified on the cross of Calvary for the forgiveness of your sins to cause your faith to mature and grow.

9.                            In 1 Corinthians 3 Paul is also reminding us of what Pastors who are called to shepherd God’s flock  go through.  At times a Pastor may feel like he’s in a pressure cooker within the church.  Some people may say that Pastor’s only work on Sunday.  They may think that from the outside looking in, a pastor’s life can sometimes seem pretty comfortable.  But, when is it ever comfortable to hold people accountable for their sins?  Is it easy to tell a couple who’ve been living together outside of marriage that they’ve been committing adultery?  Is it a simple thing to tell a man who is addicted to pornography or drugs that he’s sinning and needs to repent?  What about when the church begins to fight about how it spends its money or that the church services are just getting too long.  The church may even demand that the pastor work on growing the number of people within the congregation.  The truth is that many pastors today live with the pressure of making the church more like the world than being the people of God, our Lord wants us to be.  Unjust criticism and infighting can make a pastor’s life miserable.  But even worse, Satan can use it to suck the heart out of the ministry of a congregation.

10.                         Paul reminds us that we shouldn’t make requirements on our spiritual leaders what God Himself doesn’t require.  Of course, Pastors are responsible for shepherding the flock, for feeding God’s people with the milk and the meat of God’s Word pointing to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and for calling God’s people to live out a Christ like life.  But, notice here in 1 Cor. 3 that God alone is the one who produces the growth.  He’s the one who brings us to saving faith through the hearing of God’s Word.  He does this not only in your own life when the Holy Spirit creates and sustains your faith in Christ through the hearing of the Word and the Sacraments, but also in the life of your pastor and your own congregation.

11.                         Why do we continue to read, study and inwardly digest the Word of God and seek to hear it from our pastor?  Because Paul says in Romans 10:17   ¹⁷ …faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”  And also Romans 1:16 says, “¹⁶ For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.  For we who have the Scriptures are to study them actively, not stand idly by and neglect them.  Contrast the Corinthian Church with the Berean Church in Acts 17:10-12  where it says,¹⁰ The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue.  ¹¹ Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.  ¹² Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men.

12.                         Notice how eagerly the Bereans studied the Scriptures.  They wanted more than just the milk of Holy Scripture, but also the solid food.  In Acts 17 we learn that the Bereans “examined the Scriptures every day.” They even went home and checked what Paul was saying against the Word of God.  They didn’t stand idly by and just believe Paul because of his credentials as an apostle.  And what moved them to do that?  The Bereans knew what was at stake: eternal life and death.  They knew what they would find in the Scriptures:  certain truth, assurance that their sins were forgiven for every day.  They knew whom they would find there: their promised Messiah, their Savior, Jesus.

13.         What a beautiful encouragement for us to be like the Bereans in Acts 17 to seek the solid food and be active students of God’s Word.  Although, we probably have to admit: that too often God’s Word sits around our lives collecting dust.  We may not be in Church every week and when we are, it may be our only exposure to Scripture that week.  We may not even take the time to study God’s Word in depth with other members of our congregation in Adult Bible Study or Sunday School.

14.         If we don’t diligently study and hear the Scriptures how will we ever judge whether the teachings and practices of our church and in our own lives are true and right like the Bereans did in Acts 17?   For neglect of the Scriptures too, we beg forgiveness; we’re not innocent.  But in the Scriptures are above all God’s Word of forgiveness through His Son our Savior Jesus Christ.  Even one single sentence of forgiveness in Christ, heard only once, cleanses us of a whole lifetime of neglect of the Word and of every other sin.  One single sentence, heard only once, heard right now: For the sake of Jesus’ death and resurrection, you are forgiven, you are innocent.  Now live as the people God has called you to be seeking the solid food of God’s Word in Christ Jesus.  Amen.