Seventh Sunday After Pentecost (C) 2019

+ In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti + Amen.

Text: Colossians 2:12
Theme: Buried, Raised, Living



Dear friends in Christ Jesus,

You have already experienced a resurrection. The apostle Paul reminds us today,“…having been buried with Him in baptism, and raised with Him through your faith in the power of God, who raised Him from the dead.”1 Your spiritual life has been resurrected from the abyss of unbelief. The Scriptures also talk about this in Revelation 20, “Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them.”2 The first resurrection is the resurrection of faith, the spiritual resurrection. Physical and eternal death have no power over believers. The second resurrection, the bodily resurrection, will follow as a matter of course. But we’re not there yet.

Many people have experienced more than one spiritual resurrection. Faith can be lost. It can die. Believers can and do reject God’s truth and wander so far from Him that their faith is destroyed. The Bible constantly warns us about falling away from the faith. We can easily fall into the thinking that sin only involves those obvious transgressions that harm others and show unfaithfulness to God; lying, selfishness, dishonesty, hard-heartedness, sexual immorality, jealousy, anger, arrogance, disobedience, bodily, psychological, and emotional injury, and the list goes on indefinitely.

Indeed, these are all manifestations of sinfulness. But the root cause is unbelief in all of its expressions. People harm others because they don’t believe God is providing or will provide sufficiently for them. This includes fearing His judgment and trusting His promises. People are selfish because they don’t believe God is generous. People are deceitful because they think they can escape God’s judgment. People get jealous because they don’t trust God’s promises. Unbelief is at the root of all sin. Ultimately people fear, or get angry about, or despair over their mortality because they don’t carry the hope that Christ has triumphed even over death itself.

The person of faith, the believer, struggles not only against all types of temptations, he or she believes God speaks the truth and will finally give deliverance from every affliction. It’s important that we understand our faith- especially how it is nurtured- without being too introspective about faith’s quality. Faith is not an autonomous reality. It is a gift of trust that is completely dependent on the Holy Spirit. Through the word of promise the Holy Spirit interacts with the human heart, mind, and will. Just as an infant, even before birth, becomes attuned to its parent’s voices, and then through constant communication is fostered and formed by their influence, so too, the Spirit nurtures our faith in a similar manner. If we do not regularly have God’s word communicated to us, our faith will not be nurtured. If a child is kept in isolation and never spoken to it will not develop a proper relationship with its parents.

Because faith is a little like a muscle it must be exercised to remain fit. The Bible often calls this testing. St. Peter says, “Though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith- of greater worth than gold, which perished even though refined with fire- may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.”3 Faith is proved genuine through trials. Only believers can truly see trials as beneficial. Oswald Chambers once said, “Faith for my deliverance is not faith in God. Faith means, whether I am visibly delivered or not, I will stick to my belief that God is love. There are some things only learned in a fiery furnace.” In other words, our faith cannot be self-serving, self-interested. We don’t ‘believe’ in God in hope that He will save our necks. We believe in God because He is always true to His word and He can save us from anything.

Our faith is also tested through bearing our crosses. Bearing the cross is not a self-chosen burden. God lays crosses on us through our particular circumstances. He even allows Satan to play his role. That doesn’t mean Christ doesn’t have power over the devil. It means He uses the devil as His lackey. When Satan schemes to destabilize us, God uses those very same circumstances to strengthen us. God never intends to demoralize us. He never intends to drive us to despair. But He does need to break our sinful, selfish wills. He does need to thaw our cold and frozen hearts. He does need to dethrone our idols. Such tasks require formidable resources and determined efforts. They are beyond human ability.

Dear friends, faith is receptive, it’s not causative. Faith is instrumental in receiving God’s blessings but not influential in determining them. Your belief about God doesn’t change one single thing about His nature, His person, or His work. There is a parallel in Holy Communion. Faith is necessary to receive the blessings of Holy Communion, but it doesn’t determine them. They are what they are because of God’s word. Holy Communion is both the meal in which we enjoy the food of the sacrifice- the Lamb of God was slain on the cross for our sins- and the food in which we participate in the resurrection. Through the body and blood of Christ we are empowered with the life of the resurrected Jesus. These blessings are realized by grace through faith.

God is unalterable. He cannot be manipulated by us. We cannot outwit Him, over-power Him, or outlast Him. His life is indestructible. We can’t cleverly negotiate with Him or selfishly appeal to His sense of pity. God can’t be duped. (That doesn’t mean that plea-bargaining with God isn’t a common practice. It’s not unusual for people to try and hold God ransom, making some vow to do this or that if God delivers on the person’s request. In reality, deals with the devil are taking place while trust in God’s mercy is what is actually needed.)

Our confidence is not in our faith. Our confidence is in God. God cannot, and does not, and will not fail us. (It may appear from human perspective that God has forgotten us. But beyond our limited horizon there is always the shadow of the cross and the light of the resurrection). God sees and knows the whole picture. The Scripture says, “No matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ.”4 That’s not just a religious platitude. It’s grounded on the plain fact of the death and resurrection of God’s one and only Son. The Spirit says, “In Christ all the fulness of the Deity lives in bodily form.”5

Dear friends, the apostle Paul says, “I can do everything through Him who gives me strength.”6 The only limits on faith are the limits God determines. In May of 2001, a man named Erik Weihenmayer accomplished something that only about 150 people per year do—reaching the top of Mount Everest. The thing that made Erik’s achievement unusual is that he is the first blind person to succeed in scaling the tallest mountain in the world. Erik was born with a degenerative eye disease, and by the time he was thirteen he was completely blind. Rather than focus on what he could not do, he pressed on with what he could do and went much further than almost anyone expected.

You have already experienced a resurrection. The Bible calls our Spirit-given faith a deposit guaranteeing what is to come7. Imagine what the future holds! Amen.

+ In nomine Jesu +

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
28 July 2019
Reverend Darrin L. Kohrt

1 Colossians 2:12 2 Revelation 20:6
3 1 Peter 1:6-7 4 2 Corinthians 1:20
5 Colossians 2:9 6 Philippians 4:13
7 2 Corinthians 1:22