The Continuing Works

Biblical Text: John 14:1-14

The text ends with what I personally think is one of the toughest sayings in the bible. “You will do greater works than these” along with the promise to ask anything and it will be given. Any fair presentation has to establish what works are being talked about such that the promise could be true. The question about prayer is a little easier and most people will accept answers like “well, if you ask for a knife, because you are going to kill someone, that isn’t likely to be answered yes by God.” But saying that those who believe will do greater works than Jesus is much tougher.

The lead up to this saying is about who exactly Jesus is and what works – or maybe I should say work – he is doing. And that work is primarily filling up his Father’s house. The work Jesus is doing is calling people back into a right relationship with God – with the Father. And that is where the sermon starts. And it builds from there through the conversation that Jesus has with Thomas and Philip. A conversation that I think is almost natural and deeply enlightening. As well as full of good news.

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Abiding in the Vine

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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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Judgement By Works?

Biblical Text: Matthew 25:31-46
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The last judgement text can give a Lutheran heartburn, primarily because it inspires the question in the title.

What this sermon does is attempt to put the last judgement within its context in Matthew. It seeks to stay within two guard rails in interpretation: being willing to say ‘I don’t know’ and letting the text tell us what it means. There are two important questions that this is applied to. 1) Who are all the nations? 2) Who are the brothers Jesus references? These two questions form two halves of an answer. They also help I think to answer that title question, or at least lessen its force. The sermon ends with three short applications for our life together.

If we are willing to narrow the scope of the what those phrases mean – which I believe is correct based on the Gospel text itself – we get both a more humble eschatology, a text that is encouragement instead of judgement, and a greater emphasis on faith and church life.

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