Here, finally, is the last installment of the Trumpet Child series. A while back Megan and I went to an OtR concert in NYC where we gave them (via their guitar player) a copy of all these posts. Who knows if they got them. Either way, enjoy!

The trumpet child will lift a glass
His bride now leaning in at last
His final aim to fill with joy
The earth that man all but destroyed 

Here we arrive at the end of the song, and what we get once again is another beautiful image, Christ and his bride celebrating his final victory. His bride now leaning in at last. For some reason, I feel like there are a number of OtR songs that use this language of “leaning in.” It strikes me as very Linfordesque. I’ll have to do some research.

The bride here, of course, is the church. The church so afflicted and torn throughout the centuries will finally rest in her Savior’s arms. Her disobedience will be overcome and her destiny to be the children of God through Christ (Eph. 1) will finally be realized. The glass mentioned here could be several things. It could simply be a glass from the final “marriage feast of the Lamb” spoken of in Revelation, which would make sense of why he is lifting it, as if to give a toast at his wedding reception. But there is another place where Christ lifts a glass in front of his friends: “And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood’” (Luke 22:19-20). To be sure, the marriage feast cup and the last supper cup are really the same. Both cups represent God’s abundant blessing and provision. Both cups are given in thanksgiving. Both cups are given by Christ.

His final aim to fill with joy / The earth that man all but destroyed. This is the perfect way to end the song. It captures the remarkable hope of the song, yet it does not let us forget about where we still reside—in a broken world. Christ’s final aim is our joy. As Iranaues says, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” God has no hidden agenda, no secret plans, no phony posturing. The best answer I can give to the problem of evil is right here: divine transparency. God hides nothing from us. There is no dark secret of God. Jesus Christ is the being of God among us. And God’s will for us? Joy. God entire will is in Jesus Christ, to subvert our destruction and replace will everlasting life.

One final comment on the song as a whole to close things out: Writing about the eschatological future always brings with it a good many dangers, one of them being that we lose a proper orientation to the broken world we continue to inhabit. Eschatological hope can all too often turn into an unfounded optimism or an inappropriate negativity toward the present world. Either we think we can bring in the eschaton, or we think we should simply forsake this world and wait for the next one. Neither attitude is reconcilable to biblical eschatology. It is this world that God will redeem, but we must always remember that God will do it, not us.

Real Christian eschatological hope, therefore, is dialectical. On the one hand, we look around and see that our world is far from its final joy and that, even though we are compelled to do what we can to anticipate the world’s re-making, our efforts at improving it are always thwarted from a thousand different angles. Our projects and dreams often fail; our own weaknesses hold us back; others do not support us like we thought they would. We usually have ample cause to despair of our efforts. In short, we continually realize that we cannot fix the world, and indeed, that we are part of the problem. On the other hand, Christians live and move and have their being under the constant consolation of the Gospel. If we have ears to hear, we know that God’s ‘Yes’ to the world in Christ runs deeper and subverts every ‘No’ and ‘Maybe’ we utter to God and neighbor. When we see and hear Christ as he really is, we behold the promise of a new creation and the undoing of the powers that bind this old one. Despite our failings, we are called and enabled to be witnesses to the startling fact of God’s redemptive presence among us. We are permitted to be joyful, yes, even happy. The Gospel enables us to carry on in this broken world, for this broken world. But we never forget that it is a broken world. As Karl Barth puts it, Christian existence in this world is one in which we “laugh through tears.”

Over the Rhine’s music in general, this song in particular, has helped me to know what it might mean to “laugh through tears.” ‘The Trumpet Child’ offers wonderfully lavish pictures of the world to come, it is an incredibly hopeful song; yet it is shot through with a realization that our world is still broken and that God alone can get us out of this mess. It is no accident that the song is in a minor key. The song itself embodies the dialectic of Christian hope. It is a joyful and confident anticipation of Christ’s final victory, yet its music captures the pain of the current state of the world. And for those extra-careful listeners, is there a trumpet it in song? Yes, but it is muted, and it only makes a very brief appearance. Christ is with us, yes, but we do not see him fully: “now we see in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12). We have yet to hear the un-muted blast of our re-creation. For now, we sigh, and groan, and pray, and leave space for the real Trumpet Child to play his tune. 

Here is a sermon on Romans 8:12-25 I preached this past Sunday.

I 

What is it that you hope for? ‘Hope’ is a funny word in our language, because its use spans the entire range of human experience. Think of all the ways we use the word: “I hope something good is on TV tonight; I hope that check doesn’t bounce; I hope John makes it back from Iraq alive; she just lost hope; the Cubs aren’t going to win the World Series, it’s hopeless.” Despite this diversity of use—from trivial to profound—there is something that unites our typical usage of the word. When we use the word ‘hope,’ we usually intend to make a statement about the one doing (or not doing) the hoping. We verbalize our hopes—or lack of them—usually, to alert other people about the kind of person we are, about our desires and dreams. In other words, our hopes are usually our present concerns or wishes. They describe an internal state of affairs rather than confidence in an external reality. Our hopes are what we, from the present, project into the future.

Take, for instance, the political campaign of Barack Obama. One of the most prominent themes in his speeches and campaign literature is hope. One of his books is titled, The Audacity of Hope. What does he mean by it? Basically this: “things in this country are not where they need to be. But America is a strong nation full of people who want a better future, people filled with hope. If we band together, we can realize these hopes.” Notice how he understands what hope is. It is our desire for a future state of affairs and our belief that we can get there. It is a belief in human potential. All of this is summarized in his campaign slogan: “Yes, we can!” Hope, in his political rhetoric, is an energy within us. It is what pushes us to move out into the future with a desire to change things. 

What I want to do this morning is ask, “What does it mean to hope as a Christian? What difference does the Gospel make in what we choose to hope for? How do we situate ourselves in this world that usually appears hopeless?” For, you see, being a Christian does make a difference. The Gospel teaches us to hope differently than the world, differently than politicians. The Christian knows what so many in the world don’t, namely, that there is hope, even when everything seems hopeless and lost, and that the hope to be had comes to us not as human potential but as a startling and unimaginable gift. And the reason for this is because Christians do not hope in themselves. We do not rely on our own strength; we do not hope from our own strength. We do not hope for something, but in someone. Christian hope is energized not by wishes and dreams but by a name, Jesus Christ, and by the God who bears that name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I’m going to turn to our passage and have Paul guide our thoughts on this, and then I will reflect with you on what it might mean to hope today.

II

Once again Paul speaks to us. And once again, as last week, we are confronted by a different world. Paul is a man gripped by the Gospel, and not by a gospel that is small and puny, but by the Gospel of Jesus Christ that is large and cosmic and apocalyptic. And Paul wants his readers to believe in this Gospel; he wants them to see and feel the cosmos and its history as a reality shaped by the Gospel—grounded in the eternal will of the Father, rescued from destruction by the death and resurrection of the Son, and moving toward perfection by the power of the Holy Spirit. Thinking like this is the most important thing in the universe, for Paul.

In our passage this morning, Paul is dealing with this question: “Given that the cosmos has been invaded by the Gospel of God’s apocalyptic righteousness in Jesus Christ, given that there is now no condemnation for those in Jesus Christ, given that the Spirit of Jesus Christ has been unleashed, freeing us from the law of sin and death, claiming us for righteousness, what now is our attitude in this world? How do we now situate ourselves in this world? How do we now respond to the events that happen everyday around us?” And this question is given greater urgency because of the present state of our world: though the world is a place where is Gospel is alive and powerful, it is still a place ravaged by sin and marked by death. Suffering still abounds. Sin remains, even and especially for us Christians. Though Jesus Christ has condemned sin in the flesh, he has yet to speak his final and definitive Word that will end history and eradicate every sin and evil, he has yet to come in glory to conclude our redemption. Though Jesus Christ has accomplished for us everything needed for our salvation and eternal life, what he has done for us has yet to be made a final reality in us. Over our world and each of our lives there stands the ‘Already’ of the Gospel and the ‘Not Yet’ of our final redemption. So the question is urgent: “How do we live, what is our attitude in such a situation? How do we live surrounded by both the law of sin and death and the law of the Spirit of life?”

Paul gives an answer with two parts, the second of which I want us to focus on this morning. The first part is vs. 12-15, which you can look at on your own. His basic point there is that life in the Spirit and life in the flesh are not two equal options for Christians. We don’t choose between them like we choose between apple juice and orange juice in the morning. Life in the Spirit has already claimed us and so life in the flesh is no longer an option. But what does it mean to live in the Spirit? Here we come to the second part of Paul’s answer.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. It is for hope that we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

This is probably one of the richest and most complex passages in all of the New Testament. Here we stand before a theological Mt. Everest—big, beautiful, and not for the faint of heart. Obviously I can only begin to scale it. So I am going to pick one phrase and run with it: (v. 24) It is for hope that we were saved. For Paul, what it means to live by the Spirit is to live as one who hopes. What the Spirit does in us is turn us into people who face the future with hope. The life that we are bound to in this suffering and sinful world, the whole point of being Christians, is a life of hope. To live according to the flesh is to live without hope. To live according to the Spirit is to live with hope.

Now all that sounds great, but the most important thing has yet to be said. Hope is an empty concept until we make clear what it is we are hoping for or in. Does Paul mean here what we usually mean by hope, projecting our wishes and dreams into the future? Does he mean to say that Christians are just incredibly optimistic people? Hardly. Paul writes, we who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. Christian hope is not belief that we can or will accomplish something in the future; Christian hope is not belief in our ability that we can make the world a better place. Christian hope is the confidence and expectation that Jesus Christ will finish his work of redemption. It is the belief that history has a shape given to it by the Gospel, that for all its twists and turns and dead ends, the entire fabric of reality is set under the promise of Jesus Christ.

One of the most interesting and staggering lines in this passage is the following:  for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. What in the world does Paul mean? I think it is something like this: all of creation, including humanity, has fallen under God’s judgment. The world as we know it is not God’s final intention for a flourishing creation, but a world subjected to futility because of sin. Every suffering, i.e., every natural disaster, every burden of guilt, every pain we inflict on one another, every loss, is mysteriously connected into the whole of a creation that groans in bondage to the powers of sin and death. But, God has subjected creation to this in hope, says Paul, in hope that the entire cosmos will be set free when and as God’s children are set free in the redemption of their bodies. Here’s what I think that means: the world is what it is—a place of bondage and groaning—because it exists under God’s judgment, because God has handed it over to the powers of sin and death. But God’s judgment, according to Paul, has already been exercised in its fullness and finality in the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, whom God handed over to death. He, Jesus Christ, finally, is the one who subjects the world to futility. But he does this in his own death for us. The world’s condemnation and judgment happened in him. Now the final step: what all this means is that every other suffering in the entire history of the universe, whether from sin or from tragedy, is but a shadow cast from the cross of Jesus Christ. The bondage all creation suffers from, including yours and mine, is but a pointer to the sufferings of the one who died for us. And so all the sufferings of the world can be endured in hope, for there is One who has suffered them for us and taken away their sting. Only because there would be the death of Jesus, did God subject the world to death, and so he subjected it in hope. This is why in v. 17 Paul speaks of suffering with Christ. Creation is subjected to futility, but in the hope of Jesus Christ who bears our futility and bears it away, opening the way to the new creation. I’m going to return to this in a bit and explain why this is immensely relevant.

The basic point is that Christian hope views the entire world and its history as the arena of the sovereign God of the Gospel. The Christian looks back to Jesus Christ and what he has done for us and on that basis trusts that the future is also a place where Jesus Christ will be for us. The one who died for us and rose for us, he will surely come to us again and finalize his redemption of the whole world, turn our faith into sight. That is Christian hope. It interprets reality as the story of God’s grace. It is not aloofness or unconcern for the present world bound in suffering, nor is it a fix everything attitude, but a Spirit born longing and a groaning within the suffering world and a trust in Jesus Christ that he has set our sinful, suffering world under the promise of perfection at his return. It is a belief, in the words of Paul, that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.

III

Now, how does all this complex Pauline theology matter for us today? Can’t we just do without all this theology and simply trust in Jesus? I don’t think so. For without the theology we wouldn’t know how to trust in Jesus.

Just this past week I received a devastating phone call from an older friend. After ten years of faithful service to a company, they laid her off. At 60, she now has to scramble to find another job to support her family. Just this past week this church suffered a devastating loss. After a long battle with cancer Sheri passed away. Her family is now left to grieve and try to move on. Our world continues, as it always has, to suffer from seeming hopelessness—political conflicts, economic downturns, and all the rest. How are we Christians going to hope in these situations? What are the resources we have to view the future not with gloomy faces and morose thoughts but with confident and joyful expectation? Every one of our lives is full of obstacles and disappointments and challenges. How do we hope in the midst of them?

Here’s where Paul’s theology is important and should matter every day of your life. For one attitude to all the hopeless situations in this world is to throw up our hands and say, “Well, nothing that happens here on earth ultimately matters, my soul is secure in heaven, I’ll just try to ignore the pain of the world because one day it will be gone.” Many Christians are tempted to have this attitude, but the problem is this is not Christian hope. It is closer to hopelessness. Real Christian hope, as Paul teaches us, is hope for this world, an expectation for this world. We don’t hope for escape from this world, but for the redemption of this world. It is this world we live in, the one subjected to futility, that is marked by the sure hope of Jesus Christ. It is this world ravaged by war and poverty and job loss that really and truly has been given hope. It is the physical body of Sheri that just suffered death that is marked with the hope of resurrection.

Christian hope is hope in this world, for this world, based on Jesus Christ who has come to this world. And here is the final word to be said. Because of this it is an active hope. Christian hope does not just sit around and wait. We actively wait. Just like a pregnant mother waits for her child by making all sorts of preparations, we Christians are called to be active in our hope. We are to face the world, in all its hopelessness, expecting, looking for, and working toward small signs that our times are the lead up to the great Day and Appearing of Jesus Christ. For that is what they are. Christians do not—cannot—abandon the world to hopelessness. We ought to be the most hopeful people in the world, making the world a place that anticipates and looks for the appearing of Jesus Christ, our hope. To do this is to live according to the Spirit. Amen. 

Here is the sermon on Romans 8:1-4 I preached today.

I

My intention this summer as regards preaching was to follow the lectionary, specifically as it takes us through the Gospel of Matthew. The lectionary this summer also has us reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, but I wanted to give myself a challenge and stick with Matthew.  For me, the Gospels are more difficult to preach than Paul. They are more elusive. As my mentor back in high school, who loved the gospels, used to say, “Paul is always giving away the punch line! He just says what he means and means what he says. He’s too straightforward. But the gospels, ah, they tell a story. They follow Jesus on his winding journey to Jerusalem. Their punch line is a narrated event, Jesus’ death and resurrection. They don’t leave us with a neat explanation, just amazement.” But me, I love punch lines. I love explanations, someone saying, “This is the point…” You can see why I want to be a theologian. I’m like Jesus’ disciples after one of his parables. “But Jesus, what in the world does that parable mean?” So it has been a good discipline for me to resist the lure of Romans and stick with Matthew.

But this week Paul overpowered me. This week Paul offers the punch line of all punch lines. This week we come to Romans 8. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the Law, weakened by the flesh, could not do, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. There is so much here. So much that is beautiful and precious and profound beyond imagination. So much that we need to hear, again and again and again. Here, simply and straightforwardly, is the Gospel. One of my favorite preachers decided to preach through the book of Romans with his congregation. It took him eight and a half years. He spent two weeks on the word ‘now’ in 8:1. This text deserves that kind of care. We should be living and breathing these words. So I had to preach on this text.

Here’s my plan: First, I want us to reflect on the context we live in and how Paul confronts us from a different world. Then I’m going to look at the passage directly and try to mine some of its riches. What is Paul saying to us? Finally, I’ll return to our context and reflect with you on how we should respond to these immense words.

II

If I were to ask you, “What occupies your emotional energy?”, what would you say? Or if I asked you, “What do you spend most of your time thinking about?”, what would you say?” I ask these questions, because our culture, whether we realize it or not, dictates to us answers to these questions. Every time you walk out of the house, every time you turn on the TV, every time you enter a store, you are bombarded with a vision of how to live your life. And what is that vision? Put simply, it is: “You deserve as much comfort and convenience as you can get your hands on. So go get it!” We are told that our time, money, and emotional energy should be spent on making our lives one big automated convenience. And this vision is extremely tempting. It promises so much. Once we have experienced convenience in one area of our lives, we want it for every area of our lives. And after all, what could be wrong about pursuing convenience and comfort?

As an example, think about the entertainment industry. Today, it is absolutely ubiquitous; it is everywhere. There is no place or time when we are not able conveniently to escape seriousness and responsibility and dip into some form of cheap entertainment. Think about the iPhone. At anytime and anyplace you can have whatever form of entertainment you want—movies, music, the internet, chatting, video games, and I’m sure a whole lot more. With an iPhone or its equivalent, there is nothing to stop you from making your entire life one long, convenient escape from reality. Our culture is systematically turning everything into a medium for amusement. In 1985, long before the iPod or the iPhone, Neil Postman wrote a book about American culture titled, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. The title is even more apt today. Here is a quote:

Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

III

Now what does all this have to do with Paul and our passage today? It’s this: perhaps one of the greatest temptations we Christians face today is the temptation so to immerse ourselves in and capitulate to a culture of convenience and entertainment that we deaden ourselves to the glorious and profound and cosmic truths that grip Paul. Let me say it another way: if we fill our souls, if we spend all our emotional energy on, the pursuit of trivialities, the Gospel will not appear to us as the all-encompassing, thrilling, world-shattering reality that it is. Our Christianity will be boring. Our God will be small. Our lives will be wasted. And that would be tragic. My message this morning is simple. I want to proclaim to you the immensity of the Gospel and have you feel its weight. No condemnation! Freedom in the Spirit! It is the most important truth in the universe. And Paul lays it out right in front of us.

To understand Paul, especially in his letter to the Romans, you have to shift your thinking quite a bit. Paul thought about Christianity and went about being a Christian in a way that very few—if any—of us do. Paul was absolutely gripped by what he called the “apocalyptic revelation of the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ” (Rom. 1-3). He was so gripped by this reality that he even called himself a slave of Jesus Christ and a slave to righteousness. Now what does that mean, the apocalyptic revelation of the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ? It basically means this: the good news that Christianity proclaims, the good news that the Gospel is, is the news that because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the world we now live in, ruled as it is by sin, death, and destruction, has itself been destroyed, put to death, judged, condemned. That’s why the Gospel is apocalyptic; it announces the end of the world. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes, May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world (6:14). But with the destruction of the old creation there has come the birth of a new creation and the unleashing of God’s future, which Paul calls the Spirit. The Galatians verse continues: Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is new creation. And in 2 Corinthians Paul writes, If anyone is in Christ—there is new creation! The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (5). All of this—the death of the old world in the crucifixion of Jesus and the birth of the new world in the resurrection of Jesus—Paul called the revelation of the righteousness of God. And because of this apocalyptic righteousness, we sinners, those who make the world a place of sin, death, and destruction, are astonishingly made righteous, that is, we are allowed entrance into the new creation. Through the Gospel it is announced to us, “You sinner! You have been put to death through the death of Jesus. God has put an end to your sin, judging it and condemning it. But Jesus is risen! And you have been raised with him! God’s love has triumphed for you! You may now await and live into God’s new creation, which is coming quickly.”  

Paul was a man overcome by this message. He lived his entire life toward what he called, “the day of Jesus Christ,” the Day when the new creation in Christ would appear for the whole world. His attitude in this world was one of longing and expectation and risk taking for the Gospel message. Nothing else mattered to him except that the Gospel of God’s apocalyptic righteousness be known throughout the world. Nothing. This comes out strikingly in his letter to the Philippians. The Philippians sent Epaphroditus to check up on Paul as he was in chains and under house arrest. Paul’s response is basically, “the gospel is doing just fine. It is actually spreading because of my imprisonment. Let’s rejoice!” That’s amazing. Who among us lives like this?

So as we hear our passage from Romans this morning, I want you to hear it with the urgency with which it was written. Paul is not making some benign, esoteric theological point that only seminarians should care about. He’s telling us the most important and central truth in the universe. Let’s turn to our passage.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The little word ‘now’ is crucial. It signifies that something has happened. Before there was condemnation, but now there is not. Now that Jesus Christ has been crucified and raised, we are in a different situation than before. Reality has changed. Christianity is the proclamation of this ‘now.’ The church exists because of this ‘now.’ Our life and mission is not based on some timeless principle or set of morals but on an historical event. The event of Jesus Christ!

And what has happened is that the condemnation under which we existed has vanished. Think back to what I said about Paul’s apocalyptic thinking. Before Christ, there was only our world under the rule of sin, death, and destruction. And a world ruled by sin is can only be under God’s condemnation. Think of cancer. When cancer cells invade a body and make it a place of death, the only proper response to the cancer is to kill it. We don’t try to improve cancer cells. We kill them. God doesn’t try to improve or polish the sin of the world. He kills it. And to make his point about just how awful sin is, Paul engages in a very interesting conversation about the Law in chapter 7. His basic point is that sin is so awful that it has even hijacked God’s good Law and turned it into an instrument of sin and death. Even God’s good Law! God’s precious gift to Israel, the means by which he points his people to his grace and provision, it is now a law of sin and death. Think of it like this: It is evil to poison and kill a child. It is doubly evil to trick a mother into poisoning and killing her own child. Sin does the latter, especially with God’s Law. It takes what is good and perverts it for the sake of evil. It is wicked, awful. If I had time, I would explore how this happens. But here’s the most terrifying thought. You and me—we are sinners. We are enslaved by sin. We have perverted God’s Law. We are God’s enemies.  We commit sin. Along with the rest of the world we stand under God’s condemnation, his ‘No.’

That was then. But now, thanks be to God, we stand in the ‘now’ of Jesus Christ. Now, there is no more condemnation. What has happened? Paul tells us: For what the Law was powerless to do, weakened by the flesh, God did, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh. This one line here expresses perhaps the most profound and glorious truth of the Gospel. God himself took responsibility for our condemnation! He bore it for us, and bore it away. It’s not that our condemnation has not happened; it’s not that my sin and your sin has escaped judgment; it’s not that the world has been let off the hook. No, Paul says it clearly. He, that is God, condemned sin. Sin has been judged; the world has ended; the apocalypse has occurred. But where, you might ask. I don’t see it. I still see sin in the world. I still feel sin in me. The answer is in Jesus Christ. God has sent his own Son into the world to bear the world’s condemnation. Look to Jesus for the end of sin! Don’t look to yourself. God has inserted himself into the conflict between God and us, and there, on the body of Jesus Christ, I died, and you died, indeed the whole world has been crucified. This is the mystery you must believe in order to be a Christian. This is what it means to be in Jesus Christ. It means believing that when Jesus died, you died, you and your sin. And this is not simply a metaphor. Paul means it when he says in Galatians, I have been crucified with Christ. This is why Christians where crosses, why we put them in our places of worship. Because there, on the cross, my sin and your sin, and all the sins of those who will believe in Jesus, were put to death.

And what is the result? For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. The crucified Jesus has been raised from the dead. God has confirmed through this that sin really was condemned when he died. The world really was crucified. The law of sin and death is no more, and in its place, the law of the Spirit of life. When Jesus rose from the grave, the new creation rose with him. Just as I am crucified with Christ, I am resurrected with Christ. As a result of the crucifixion and resurrection, the Spirit has been unleashed. God’s future now is established. We are now free to live according to that future, to live according to the Spirit, to live with no condemnation. God has invaded this old world of sin and death and set up his kingdom. He has created things anew. What rules the world now is not death, but life, not sin, but righteousness, not sinners, but Jesus Christ. 

IV

Back to our context. How do we respond to all this? How does all this apocalyptic thinking matter in my everyday life? Jesus, crucified and raised, old sinful creation, destroyed in Christ, new creation, established in Christ, the Spirit has been unleashed. What I am supposed to do? First, and most basically, do you feel the weight of these truths? Do you recognize how massive and profound and important they are? If nothing else, all of us should walk away from this passage praying, “Lord I believe. Help my unbelief! Open my eyes to the Gospel. Open my heart to feel its weight. Give me more faith to cherish your Son Jesus Christ.” Is your Christianity small? Do you think of your faith like Paul does, in cosmic, apocalyptic, world-shattering ways? Or is your Christianity just something that you dabble in from time to time, reading the Bible occasionally, offering up a prayer now and then, and coming to church however frequently. If that’s you, if you Christianity is small, then I pray that God would use this text this morning to awaken you to how massive and all en-compassing the Gospel is. There is no room for mediocrity in Paul’s vision of things. There is no ‘sort-of’ with a crucified and risen Savior. Pray that the trivialities we often occupy ourselves would be crowded out by a deep love and joy in the Gospel.

Second, this text is about your everyday life. This world we live in, the one where we go to work and school, raise our kids, do our hobbies is the world where Jesus Christ reigns as the crucified Lord. Ask yourself, do I live with an awareness that our world has been invaded with the Gospel?  How do you treat your spouse differently because there is no condemnation in Christ? How do you raise your kids differently because the Gospel is the deepest truth of reality? How do you spend your time on the internet differently because the world has been crucified with Christ? These are the kinds of questions we should be asking. We live in a world where Jesus reigns, where there is no condemnation in Christ, where the new creation has broken in. Adults, how are you planning for your lives long term? Have you bought the lie of the American dream? Is your goal to retire, buy a second vacation house or maybe a yacht and coast out of life? How does that plan fit in a world where the Gospel is true? Why not be like Paul? Donate yourself for the cause of the Gospel. Don’t buy a yacht; go be a missionary. Kids, teenagers, how are you letting the Gospel shape your lives? Do you care more about the approval of friends than the approval of almighty God that you have in Jesus Christ? Do you fear the condemnation of not fitting into pop culture more than the condemnation that results from your sin? If so, you are living a lie. God is more important than anything. Believe in Jesus more than the latest fashion. He is so much better.

And finally, our culture. I began by pointing out that we in American society are amusing ourselves to death. How are we Christians going resist that? How are we going to resist the bombardment of entertainment and convenience? How are we going to live lives that aren’t just one cheap thing after another? By believing that Romans 8:1-4 is the deepest truth of reality. You see the thing with entertainment and convenience is that they make promises. They paint a view of the world that says, “If you pursue these things, you will be living the good life. You will be tapping into the best parts of life. You will be living with the grain of the universe.” But as Christians, we have the resources and responsibility to say, “No, you’re wrong, that’s a lie.” The world has been crucified with Christ. God has condemned the world in the flesh of his Son. That means that when the entertainment industry makes it seem like its services are the meaning of life, they are lying. The world is not heading to a place where Microsoft or Macintosh or MTV or Hollywood or the NBA will be all in all. The world is headed toward new creation, where Jesus will be all in all. By actually believing that, you have immense power to resist the lies our culture throws at us.  

So brothers and sisters, believe the Gospel, I plead with you. Believe that there is no condemnation in Jesus Christ, that your sin has been put to death, and your life secured with Christ. And live according to the magnitude of that reality. Let it determine everything, because, in truth, it already does. Amen.  

Today is John Calvin’s 499th birthday. Calvin was an immense theologian and churchman in the 16th century, and he continues to inspire many, including me, in countless ways today. Since my task this summer is the writing of sermons, I thought I’d include a quote from a Calvin biographer about Calvin’s preaching. He sets a benchmark for all of us flimsy preachers.

And so we trace him preaching on Sundays with one hundred and eighty-nine sermons on the Acts between 1549 and 1554, a shorter series on some of the Pauline letters between 1554 and 1558, and the sixty-five on the Harmony of the Gospels between 1559 and 1564. During this time the weekdays saw series on Jeremiah and Lamentations (up to 1550), on the Minor Prophets and Daniel (1550-2), the one hundred and seventy-four on Ezekiel (1552-4), the one hundred and fifty-nine on Job (1554-5), the two hundred on Deuteronomy (1555-6), the three hundred and forty-two on Isaiah (1556-9), then one hundred twenty-three on Genesis (1559-61), a short set on Judges (1561), one hundred and seven on 1 Samuel and eighty-seven on 2 Samuel (1561-3) and a set on 1 Kings (1563-4).

Before he smiles at such unusual activity of the pulpit, the reader would do well to ask himself whether he would prefer to listen to the second-hand views on a religion of social ethics, or the ill-digested piety, delivered in slipshod English, that he will hear today in most churches of whatever denomination he may enter, or three hundred and forty-two  sermons on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, sermons born of an infinite passion of faith and a burning sincerity, sermons luminous with theological sense, lively with wit and imagery, showing depths of compassion and the unquenchable joyousness of hope. Those in Geneva who listened Sunday after Sunday, day after day, and did not shut their ears, but were “instructed, admonished, exhorted, and censured,” received a training in Christianity such as had been given to few congregations in Europe since the days of the fathers (John Calvin: A Biography, T.H.L. Parker).  

Who can tell me what we celebrated this past Friday? Right, the fourth of July. And what do we celebrate on the fourth of July? Right, our country’s freedom. Who saw fireworks? So did I. I was in Boston, a pretty historic city, so it was neat. And my wife and her mother were in Washington D.C. for the fourth, so they had a good time as well.
  

You know, it is good for us to celebrate the country we live in. We should be happy about the good things our country stands for. It is even right to thank God for our country and ask him to give us wisdom so we can be a better country. But a holiday like the fourth of July also presents us with things we should worry about, especially as Christians. Around the fourth of July, we often hear things like, ‘Thank God for freedom’ or ‘God bless America.’ Here I have a one dollar bill. On all our money we have the phrase, ‘In God we trust.’ We usually don’t think much about these phrases, but we should.

The reason is because when these phrases use the word ‘God,’ they aren’t referring to the same thing we Christians mean when we use the word ‘God.’ We should worry about this because if we use these phrases without lots of care, we might be committing idolatry. We might be worshipping a false God.

You see, the true God, the God Christians worship, has a Name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We don’t worship a nameless God. Our God is exciting, full of love and surprise. The true God is revealed under the name Jesus Christ and nowhere else. But the God our country talks about is nameless. This God is boring; it has no personality. We don’t worship this God.

Our country uses the word ‘freedom’ a lot as well. Christians also use the word ‘freedom.’ But again, often we mean different things. The freedom our country gives us is the freedom of choice. Now this is a good thing, but only so far. We shouldn’t worship this kind of freedom. However, the freedom our God gives us, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is infinitely better than the freedom our country gives us. Our God gives us the freedom to love one another, even our enemies. Our country can never give us this freedom. Our God frees us from always worrying about ourselves, which doesn’t do any good anyway, and gives us the wonderful task of taking care of each other.

So yes, it is good to be happy about the good things our country stands for. It is even right to thank God for our country. But let’s be sure we are thanking the right God and living the kind of life he wants from us.