Text: Psalm 45
Sorry about not having audio. It didn’t happen tonight. It’s the final Lenten Midweek. Next week is Holy Week. But the day, March 25, is a real festival day on the church calendar – The Annunciation. Which is a little weird for a Lenten series, but as I thought about it, not that weird at all. At least not for the Redemption Tour. Because it is right there that all the redemption starts. And that is what this sermon is about.
This is something of the end of the Redemption Tour. We still have one more Lenten Midweek, but next week is actually the Annunciation, so I can tie it into the Redemption Tour, but the theme would change. These four weeks we’ve looked at specific things in the Christian life that get redeemed by it: worship, brotherhood, witness. The thing that ties them together is the Household of God. And the final version of that household of God is not made of leaves or sky or tent skins or stones. It is made of flesh. The living stones of the believers in Jesus. God has redeemed his House – You.
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Biblical Text: Psalm 81, Acts 7:9-10
We continue our Midweek Lenten Series – The Redemption Tour. This week the theme is redemption of our witness. The Acts text comes from Martyr Stephen’s sermon as he was being stoned. And the big question for Stephen in a strange way becomes the big question for the Apostle Paul, who as Saul was holding the coats and heard that word of the martyr. And I think it might just be a big question for us. It focuses on Joseph and his brothers. Those brothers, the founders of the tribes of Israel, rejected their brother and essentially killed him. He was sent to Egypt and a land of strange tongues. But God was with him and paradoxically it was their evil action that was turned to good and saved the entire world including them. And this is Paul’s wonder about his fellow Jews who would not accept the message of Jesus and killed him. His ministry was to the gentiles and it was saving the world. Would the Jews return. The American church has seen a good deal of the same rejection and honestly the attempts to kill the message of the gospel. And it is in a terrible shape. The gospel has gone to strange tongues. Will we return? God redeems the witness. The Word goes out and it does not return empty. It may not return as we wish, but we rarely know the whole story. Our call it to witness. God redeems it.
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