Biblical Text: John 4:4-26
John 4 is a New Testament example of a “well scene”. It’s a stock backdrop that comes with some expectations for what is going to happen. John plays with these expectation is playful and revealing ways. If we are willing to hear, I think it reveals our desires that we often chase in all kinds of places – appropriate and inappropriate.
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“Sages leave your contemplations, brighter visions beam afar; seek the great desire of nations, ye have seen his natal star…(LSB 367, Angels from the Realms of Glory St. 3)”
“O Come, Desire of Nations bind in one the hearts of all mankind…(LSB 357 O Come, O Come, Immanuel St 7)”
This is not pulpit worthy, at least not yet. First because it is more an intuition than something well discerned. And second because there are so many ways it can go wrong. But desire is something fundamentally bound to Christmas.
When we are younger that desire is stoked by the wonders of the season. All the lights. The decorations coming out. A tree in the house! Cookies and just the pace of life. Before you even get to presents and Santa, a two-year old is attuned to the desire of the season. They are sad to see everything packed away. As we get older that desire moves on to: “What am I going to get?” It might be here that we start to understand something about desire. Whatever physical thing you get, the satisfaction doesn’t last that long. As soon as you get the Toy of the Year, it breaks. As soon as you open the X-box, desire moves to having the next game.
Desires of adults around the season might even be more complicated. Christmas might be the first time parents meet the new boyfriend/girlfriend. And the strange mix of desires all of that stirs up in both parents and children. Desires to give the children a “good Christmas” which gets harder each year, until it really is impossible. Desires for a gathering of the clan and a nostalgia for when everything was together. And it is not that any of these desires are necessarily bad. They might be appropriate in their seasons. And there are better and worse satisfactions of them. But if you pay close attention to the desires of season, they all tend to increase the restlessness. We place our hopes on things that can’t bear the weight, even if they are good things. Which if we are honest they often aren’t. Our desires are often that our wills would override the wills of others. That the world would stop and satisfy me.
What Christmas does is start to train our desires, in the words of a great prayer so that we “pass through things temporal that we lose not the things eternal.” It is not the fact of desire that is our problem; it is often the type of satisfaction we expect from what our hearts desire. We often place eternal desires on temporal things which can’t do anything but buckle under the weight.
The hymnwriters get this. Even if one is a sage and supposedly trained their desires for higher things, even those ideologies and deep desires are not the proper object. Brighter visions beam afar. All earthly desires should point us to our great desire. To know our creator and be known by Him. Christmas is that creator coming to us in order to be known. Christmas is that creator not just knowing us, but loving us.
Everything else we place our desires upon ultimately fails. It is only God who is an infinite source of satisfaction. As Augustine said, “we are restless, until we find our rest in thee.” So much of life is about training ourselves to have the right desires. To binding our hearts to those things which do bring peace. When the manger orders our desires, when we come and worship the Christ the newborn King, we allow Him to satisfy our deepest desires setting our hearts at peace so that we might rightly receive all the rest of the gifts of his providence. When we receive first the eternal, the temporal adorns it like so many perfect ornaments. Even the broken ones which speak of a day of mending.
Biblical Text: John 15:1-8
Why does faith feel attenuated or faint today? What is different today than even say 100 years ago? It is a question that I find myself asking over and over. And I think that that answer is what we refuse to take seriously. We will take faith itself seriously, sometimes so seriously it is just “the big lie” or maybe the necessary lie. We take works deadly seriously. Well maybe not Christians as much catechized on grace, but the world right now is all about justice which is nothing if not a demand for good works. But what we do not take seriously, as something worthy of contemplation in itself, in Himself, is God. The ground of all faith and works, the precursor to these things, is God. We are invited to abide in Christ. He is the vine and we are the branches. That is not an image of faith, but of union. And we feel that ache of desire without understanding what it is pointing at. We always get turned inward which finds nothing when the object of desire is outside of us.
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Biblical Text: Exodus 20:1-17, John 2:13-22 (1 Corinthians 1:18-31)
This sermon might be a bit intellectual, but it is lent which is a season for some challenging fare. The challenge here is to think about what does the cleansing of the temple of our body. Our first answer is always the law. We think that we can control the passions. We think that our heads control our hearts. After that falsehood breaks, I think we often pursue some “middle ground”. We want to build a temple or sacred booth in this world. We clear out a bit of the world. We put our hope in something like “beauty” or “the arts”. And it is not that the law, or “the arts”, or any of these things are wrong. It is just that tomorrow, all the money changers are back anyway.
Our hope isn’t in anything in this world. Not in the law which is written on our stone hearts, although that dead thing can’t follow it. Not in the prettiest work of human hands, even though those might move the heart occasionally. Our hope is in faith in the cross and resurrection – the work of Christ – alone. We need a new heart, a new want-er. And that only comes about by the foolish work of the Spirit.
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…The father desires for all His children to be under that protecting wing. That protecting wing that has taken care of and planned out all the necessities. All the ultimate necessities – our sin which separated us from the Father that prevented us from being gathered, the death that results from that sin, the raging of the adversary who stands behind all the Herod’s of this world who desire to kill us – The Father has supplied all our necessities in His son Jesus. Under the cross our sins have been buried. While in the tomb – Christ triumphed over that adversary – descending into hell to proclaim the victory. And on that third day – that glorious necessary third day when the course was complete – rising from the tomb and putting death forever under his feat. God desires all his children to be under that protective wing – his mighty arm of Jesus Christ….
