March 10 Worship

Music.

Jesus said, Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,

so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes

in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,

but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are

condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world,

and people love darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

For all who do Do evil hate the light, and do not come to the light,

so that their deeds may not be exposed.

But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen

that their deeds have been done in God. The Gospel of the Lord.

Music.

You may be seated. Let us pray.

Gracious God, we give you thanks for the immeasurable riches of your grace in Jesus.

God, as we open your word together this morning, we ask that you would send

your Holy Spirit to fill our hearts.

And, O God, now let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our

hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer.

At our 927 worship service this morning, I shared a video that has gone massively

viral in the past year or so.

With the original edit clearing something like 27 million views.

If you want proof that it's viral, just watch a youth around you right now,

because they're going to eye roll here in a second.

It's perhaps most famous as a viral sound, right?

And this is where someone takes the audio from a video, rips it out,

and lays it on top of their own content on a TikTok or an Instagram reel.

The video itself is of a man named Sina, who is about to take a plunge.

Literally. He's strapped in a chair on the precipice of a bungee jumping platform.

As the workers check his harness and his connection to the bungee cord,

he begins to tighten down.

His voice raises several octaves, and he begins to frantically scream at the

workers, and this is the viral bit, Let me tell you something,

let me tell you something!

He then begs the workers to double-check everything, even though they already

have, they're doing their job.

And they tell him, perhaps mischievously delighting in his fear,

that they could, but they don't have the time.

And before he gathers his breath to protest again, he is thrust.

Mercilessly off the edge and into the abyss, screaming all the way down.

And if that, sisters and brothers, isn't an apt metaphor for life,

then I don't know what is.

Now, as all of you know, and as I don't have to remind you, but I will,

life is dangerously risky.

And we humans are profoundly vulnerable.

And so as a result, each of us must come face to face and we must wrestle with

an existential anxiety.

It's that creeping question that lurks in the back of our minds. Am I going to be okay?

Is everything going to be all

right? how can I protect and safeguard all those things that I hold dear?

And so in our fear and in our anxiety, we try to take every precaution.

We try to check all the right boxes, and yet life relentlessly,

mercilessly keeps on coming.

Offering up new challenges and thrusting us off new precipices.

You see, there is an undeniable and an ironic uncontrollability that is just

part of the the fabric of this world that we share, marred and broken as it is by sin.

We feel it, right, both in those big life-shattering moments,

but even more in those small daily inconsistencies and inconveniences.

At any given point, and in spite of our best laid plans, we are always,

always probably much closer to the edge than we might like to imagine.

Life is marked by suffering. Our world is broken, and we ourselves are warped

by the power and the influence of sin.

The season of Lent in our church year gives us a healthy opportunity to pause

and to reflect and And to wrestle with the brokenness that we feel both within

ourselves and that we experience throughout our world.

Throughout these seven weeks, we follow along with Christ to the cross,

meditating on his trials, his sufferings for us, as he comes to redeem and to restore it all.

And with this, I want to arrive today at our first reading from the second chapter of Ephesians.

It's got a hard start there, doesn't it?

Personally, if I had to choose one passage from Paul's epistles to save and

memorize to sum up both the gospel of Christ and its theological implications.

It would probably be this passage.

There's a lot going on in this passage. and it begins with a timeless truth

that may offend contemporary sensibilities.

That said, it's a truth that needs to be said and remembered,

especially during this season of Lent.

It's this, that each and every one of us are dead through our trespasses and our sins. sins.

The contemporary English Bible translation puts it this way.

At one time, you were like a dead person because of the things you did wrong

and your offenses against God.

Now, I like this version a bit better because it gets at what is truly tragic about sin.

It's not necessarily that we are deserving of punishment.

That's logic that, yes, does show up in Scripture and is thrust us to mourn

more upon scripture by later interpreters.

But instead, the true tragedy of sin is that it puts us in our world into a state of deadness.

Sin robs us. Sin robs the world of the fullness of life for which God intended us.

Our sin separates us from God, and we come to miss out on the goodness of the

immeasurable riches of God's grace in which we and all creation were designed to participate in.

One of my favorite Lutheran thinkers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, notes in one of his

works that the very first sin, the original sin, set all of creation up on a slippery slope.

We have fallen, and we continue to fall, tumbling all the way down.

Sin for us humans becomes something like an addiction.

Martin Luther, following the church

fathers, describes our sinful state as being curved in on one's self.

We humans come to be addicted to self at the expense of others.

And so our world and our lives become more and more broken and down that slippery

slope we continue to tumble.

Harsh as this sounds, we've got to have a grasp on the problem before we can move on to the solution.

There is no resurrection without first.

Cross. You see, the depth of this problem reveals itself to us as we journey

through our lives and our world.

We come to know it specifically in the fear and anxiety that we come to feel

at baseline all the time.

We come to know it specifically in the dread, the fear of a not-enoughness that

we fear lies at the core of the world.

And so, as we go on through life and are battered by sin, both our own sin and

the sin of others, our expressions, they begin to tighten.

Our hearts, they begin to harden.

Our spirits wither, and we turn more and more in on ourselves,

selves, sinfully coping, and yet deepening and worsening the problem,

ironically deepening that separation from God as we await our next inevitable plunge off the edge.

This is the state of our world. It's the state of our hearts.

And we, whether we want to admit it or not, we know it well.

In our sin, at our worst, we are fearfully locked in to ourselves.

We follow, as the writer of Ephesians notes, we follow our own whims and impulses.

We do what seems right by us, and we make others pay the cost.

We come to trust, first and foremost, in ourselves. selves.

And in so doing, we, ironically, ensure that we are always going to be on the edge.

Fear beginning fear, anxiety beginning anxiety, and death beginning death.

Our sin separating us from, blinding us to the goodness of God,

always already at work in our lives.

But, thanks be to God, that is only just the first half of our reading from Ephesians.

Everything changes as we turn to verse 4 with a, and perhaps the, divine conjunction.

Think back to grade school conjunctions. The word, but.

But, despite all this, despite our sin, despite our brokenness,

this isn't the end of the story.

There's more to come. Ephesians 2, 4, and 5, I'll read it again.

But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love which he loved us,

even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

God loves us enough to send Jesus, his son, to save us, to heal our brokenness,

to restore our world. Jesus takes the cross.

Jesus defeats death to turn us inside out, to make us alive again when we are

dead in our sin, to raise us up out of ourselves and into the hearts of God.

It's no mistake that the lectionary pairs this reading with a verse that has

been called the gospel gospel in a nutshell.

John 3.16, you all know it. For God so loved the world that he gave his only

son so that everyone who believes in him won't perish but will have eternal life.

I'd be remiss if I didn't always mention that John goes on in the next verse,

John 3.17, to remind us that the whole point and purpose and mission of Jesus

was not to judge the world.

Christians are sometimes times really good at that not to judge the world but to save the world.

Friends, God doesn't see or experience the world as we do.

Where we fear scarcity, God knows only abundance.

Where we move anxiously, God moves with grace.

Where we tend to see only ourselves and our needs, God always sees the good of all.

Jesus' journey throughout the season of Lent is to save the world. world.

As the writer of Ephesians puts it, God is rich in mercy.

And Jesus comes to show us that

there is nothing that God can't love and nothing that God can't redeem.

Jesus is literally lifted up to call us back to the love that God has for us.

The divine conjunction of the cross loss, and the resurrection,

precisely when we don't deserve it, precisely because we can't earn it,

stands to remind us time and time again,

and especially in our moments of fear and anxiety, that yes,

we can put our trust in Jesus,

the one who comes to raise us up, the one who comes to to bring us back to life,

no matter when, no matter how often we fail.

Perhaps one of the most frustrating parts of the gospel in general is that the story isn't finished.

Jesus has won the victory. We are saved by grace through faith.

All of those things are past tense.

And yet, we, in our world, still groan under the burden and the weight and the

implications of sin. in.

We are left in this weird in-between time of an already, as in it's already

done and won, but a not yet.

The story isn't finished. As we say during our communion liturgy,

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

This is the mystery of our faith in this in-between-already-not-yet time we find ourselves in.

And this is precisely why, in this meantime, that our faith saves us.

Faith is, simply put, trust in Jesus.

It doesn't mean that we're going to be perfect. It doesn't mean that we won't succumb to sin.

Doesn't mean that our lives won't know brokenness,

but instead that trust in Jesus that continually looking to the cross and to

the resurrection might give us a firm foundation through it all.

Faith is resting in the true and present reality that no matter what life throws

at us, that no matter how we curve in on ourselves,

no matter how we try to separate ourselves from God, that Jesus is still lifted

up, that Christ is still risen, and that, make no mistake,

God is with us through it all.

Faith is knowing that no matter what may come, We are safe and secure.

It's a hopeful vision that we might too see the immeasurable riches of God's

grace in the ages to come.

It's finding a peace, yes, even when we are living on the edge.