Sermon Audio
The Thirteenth Sunday After Trinity
Here Be Dragons
St. John 10:22-39
We have a new orthodoxy in America. Ortho: correct. Dox: doctrine, or teaching. Our sexual politics has redefined our orthodoxy. Remember the image of the White House bathed in rainbow colors in celebration of the Supreme Court’s legalizing of same-sex marriage? There is our new banner.
Our new teaching is that our sexuality defines us. This is reductionism, which is simplifying an idea for the purpose of obscuring or distorting it. Historically, it has been the favored tool of tyrants, allowing them to apply a litmus test to identify the heterodox, those of another doctrine or teaching.
Once found out, they can be marginalized, or worse, for deviating from the state-approved groupthink. You refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding? We will impose a fine so stiff it may cripple your business and slap a gag order on you.
This new orthodoxy has been repudiating biblical teaching for some time now; today it is replacing it. Where do Christians find ourselves? Well, to use the catchphrase of the day, we’re on the wrong side of history. Considering the history we as a nation are making, there’s no place I’d rather be . . . but I can’t avoid the signs: “Terra Non Firma” and “Here Be Dragons.”
How do we respond? As always, we take instruction from the Holy Writ.
(Read text.)
You will search the Hebrew Scriptures in vain for the Feast of Dedication, where we find Jesus today. Yahweh did not ordain it.
In 167 B. C. the Syrian Antiochus Epiphanes overran the Jewish capital and polluted the temple, slaughtering on its altar that most odious of animals to the Jews, a pig. He turned the altar of burnt offering into a shrine to the pagan god Zeus. He banned the practice of the Jewish religion. One of his statutes made possession of the Hebrew Bible, or any part of it, a capital offense.
The Jews revolted. The son of a priest, Judas Maccabaeus, or “Judas the Hammer,” took to the mountains and led a campaign of guerrilla warfare that overthrew the invader.
Having retaken their temple, the Jews purified it and rededicated it on the 25th day of Kislev, the lunar month that corresponds to December, in the year 164. The celebration lasted eight days and ended with a decree that an eight-day Feast of Dedication beginning on 25 Kislev should be held each year. The Hebrew word for “dedication” is Hanukkah.
It was also known as the Feast of Lights because the Jews lit candles and lamps in their homes to symbolize that the right to worship, as the historian Josephus reported, “appeared to us at a time when we hardly dared hope for it.”
And “it was winter,” a detail probably added to explain why Jesus was walking under cover of Solomon’s porch rather than in one of the open courts, a significant matter because this was the setting in which, after the resurrection, the disciples would gather to proclaim Jesus as the Christ.
As we enter the story, in the minds of many the divinity of Jesus remains an open question. The account of the Good Shepherd discourse preceding this passage ended with mention of a dispute between those who alleged that the backwoods rabbi Jesus was demon-possessed and others who replied that His miracles argued otherwise.
Now, “the Jews” – probably again referring to the leaders – have had enough of this pussy-footing around. They put the issue in straightforward terms: “How long do You keep us in doubt? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”
We might sympathize with their frustration but for one thing. We know what Jesus knew: It makes no difference what He says or how He says it; these scoffers will not believe on Him.
In His conversation with the Samaritan woman, He revealed Himself as Messiah. We know from the synoptic gospels that He did the same with His inner circle. But in broader Jewish contexts He never gives a plain declaration of His deity. For the Jews, the title “Messiah” is freighted with political and military overtones He wishes to avoid.
More than that, though, He has said more than enough already to disclose His deity . . . to those with ears to hear. Did we not just hear Him say, when He called Himself the Good Shepherd, that He will lay down His life and take it up again? Who but God can do that?
No, neither plain speech nor gilded oratory will bring the skeptics round. Neither in that day nor in this one. Those sheep that do not belong to the Good Shepherd do not hear His voice. It will do no good for Him to shout.
To His own sheep, however, Jesus gives . . . what? He has spoken before of life “to the full,” of “abundant life.” He has wrapped up this gift in metaphors – water, bread, light, good pasture. Now He spills it out in naked language: “And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish . . .”
We’re not going to die, you and I. We should probably stop right here and ponder the implications of that statement in silent meditation. I’ll go on, of course, for I am a preacher . . . and one who wants to get paid.
But consider what our Lord said not only in terms of what it means for us but also what it says about Him. Hello? Anybody home? He said He gives eternal life. Can Billy Graham do that?
But wait. There’s more. Every word He utters, every act He performs, is an expression of the Father’s will. If you believe Me incapable of delivering on My promises, will you hold the Father impotent as well?
To argue with Me is to argue with the Father. To agree with Me is to agree with the Father. The Son has eternal life and He shares it with those whom the Father has designated and dedicated.
Now comes the hammer: “I and My Father are one.”
Oh, my, He’s gone and done it now. The Jews, who said they wanted straight talk, head straight for their inexhaustible rock pile to stone Him. And the theologians head to their word processors to bury us.
Bear with me for a moment for a small taste of Greek. The language has three genders. Jesus does not here use the masculine for “one.” If He had, He would have eradicated the distinction proclaimed in 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
They are two. So it is that the Father could send the Son and the Son could obey the Father and pray to Him.
Instead of the masculine He uses the neuter, which accommodates a level of abstraction and preserves the distinction and sets out the unity of their wills. Because the Son is utterly obedient, His will aligns perfectly with the Father’s. This might be a claim a human could make to describe his conduct for a short time with no suggestion of a unity of essence with God.
We take it as more than that because of the context. John’s purpose, we must never forget, is to reveal Jesus as the Christ, as God the Son. His gospel achieves a crescendo in chapter 20 with Doubting Thomas’ stirring confession: “My Lord and my God.”
Now for the third time the Jewish leaders try to kill Him, and in each case their motive is His claim of divinity. Their insistence that He speak plainly is beginning to sound like a punch line: We have twice before attempted to execute You for making Yourself God. Now, we demand to know: Are you or are you not saying you’re God?
I wouldn’t want these characters on a jury in traffic court and they’re sitting in judgment of the Master of the universe . . . or they think they are.
On another point, however, their confusion is genuine. They believe Him to be engaging in blasphemous self-exaltation in elevating His status to that of God. In fact, the second Adam is not replicating the sin of the first, a man trying to become God.
Instead, He is performing the most humble act in history. He has always been God. Now He puts on human flesh and becomes man. To what purpose? To be despised and rejected by men. To give Himself as a ransom for many. To humble Himself to the point of death, even death on a cross.
What’s more, these leaders are zealous for their jealous God. The shema from Deuteronomy (6:4), which opens every temple service, rings in their ears: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!” Yet they are not literate enough in their own Scriptures to grasp that Jesus is not presenting Himself as another God in competition with Yahweh but as the Messiah Yahweh promised to send.
And why should they be so alarmed over His claims? Their own Bible – specifically Psalm 82:6 – applies the word “elohim,” “gods,” to men, in this case Israel’s leaders with divinely ordained responsibilities.
If men can be called gods, how much more fitting that the One Yahweh sanctified and sent should be so identified.
If they will not believe His words, should they not believe His works – not merely the miracles but all that He has done because all has been consistent with the Father’s revealed will? Yet they do not believe. They try again to seize Him and again they fail. His hour has not yet come.
This is internecine strife, Jew vs. Jew, and there’s a lesson in it for our broader church today. While the Jews are bickering and scheming, outside forces are bearing down to crush them. Judas the Hammer drove the Syrians out, but fewer than a hundred years later Israel found herself under the heel of Rome.
In fewer than four decades following the events we’re studying, in A. D. 70, the Romans will sack Jerusalem. The Jews will scatter and they will not regain sovereignty in their land of promise until 1948.
And they have not reinstituted temple sacrifices to this day because a Muslim shrine occupies the place where the altar of burnt offering once stood.
In 21st-century America, freedom of worship is under attack. It requires no hyperactive imagination to squint into the future and spy a day in which a pastor will bring the wrath of the state down on his head for refusing to officiate at a same-sex wedding.
Or a day in which the tax exemption for churches is rescinded. Less support for the needy from the church will mean more dependence on the government, the keeper of the new orthodoxy and nursemaid of the citizenry.
The real issue is how we understand worship. The secular culture around us understands it to be an hour of preaching and singing, with maybe a prayer or two thrown in, on a Sunday morning. In the Bible, a worshipful life is a life dedicated to God, every hour of every day.
This was the view of the faithful Jews in the second century before Christ. Their dress, their diet, their legal system, their way of life in its entirety shouted their devotion to Yahweh. And Antiochus Epiphanes resolved to stamp it out.
The sovereign was an aficionado of all things Greek and, after a peaceful approach to introducing Greek ideas, customs and religion met stiff resistance, he invoked in Israel a campaign of Hellenization by terror.
Ancient historians were notorious for inflating numbers but it’s probably no exaggeration to say tens of thousands of Jews died and as many were sold into slavery. The ban on the Hebrew Scriptures was only the beginning of his draconian measures.
Antiochus made it illegal to circumcise a child. Mothers who defied the ban were crucified with their children hanging around their necks. He profaned the temple courts and turned its chambers into brothels. He emptied its treasury.
What will we see? What will our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren encounter? Fay Voshell wrote on the “American Thinker” website:
“Absolute sexual ‘freedom’ now heads up a new Bill of Rights. Now the federal government will proceed to do everything possible to promulgate the new faith. Some may protest, saying the Left’s promulgation of the LGBT movement as well as the federal government’s endorsement of the special interest group has been and still is about civil rights. Not so.
“The extremists of the LGBT movement display all the characteristics of a cultlike religion, including opposing critical thinking, severely penalizing any opposition, demanding complete and unwavering acceptance of its doctrines, putting loyalty to the cult above family and any other institution, including the Church, disallowing any member the right to change one’s mind and leave or seek change without dire consequences, as well as essentially demanding complete capitulation of conscience of doubtful converts.”
Yes, she is arguing that this sexual revolution seeks not only to drive out traditional American religion but also to replace it. The LGBT wave offers America hedonism as its creed and the orgy as its worship. Fay Voshell adds:
“Just as importantly, the LGBT movement deals with ultimate questions belonging to theology. The movement holds to theological doctrines concerning the nature of the human being, sexual identity and behavior, the definition of marriage, the family and the place of children, the role of government, and the transformation of traditional American institutions and documents adhering to Christian principles, particularly the Church and the US Constitution.
“It has set itself up as a new sexual orthodoxy that usurps the place of orthodox Christianity and Judaism. In brief, the establishment of the new state orthodoxy, the genesis of which can be found in ancient pagan phallic cults, is the culmination of several generations of efforts to displace Christianity and Judaism in America.
“Now that the modern sexual creed is woven into the very fabric of the executive and judicial branches, both will accelerate attempts to promulgate the sex cult, increasingly targeting Orthodox Christians and Jews.”
This, beloved, is the reality we confront. Diversity has its limitations as a political philosophy. People who are not in a coma register at some level that if everyone’s truth is equally valid, no truth is really true. Atheism, likewise: The absence of something makes a poor rallying cry. “Up with no God”? It falls a bit flat.
But the revolutionaries have found their float all the same. They’re parading it through the public schools even now, and they’re not stopping at contraception. The children must be educated about anal sex so those who choose to practice it can do so safely. Homosexuality is just another lifestyle option. And so on.
What must we do? We return to Scripture, and we resist. The Hebrew midwives of Exodus 1 did not murder male babies according to the Egyptian royal decree; they hid them instead. Daniel and his faithful friends did not knuckle under to the demand that they worship pagan gods.
Peter and John did not capitulate under pressure to desist from proclaiming the name of Jesus as the name above all names, telling the authorities, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
Following these heroes of the faith, we resist. So doing, we acknowledge that when persecution comes our Lord may intervene on our behalf, as He did for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and He may allow us to be crucified upside-down, as He did Peter.
Hear these words from Cardinal Francis George, former Archbishop of the Diocese of Chicago:
"I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history."
The days of cheap faith are far spent. On one soon-coming day, it will cost dear to be a Christian. Amen.
Here Be Dragons
St. John 10:22-39
We have a new orthodoxy in America. Ortho: correct. Dox: doctrine, or teaching. Our sexual politics has redefined our orthodoxy. Remember the image of the White House bathed in rainbow colors in celebration of the Supreme Court’s legalizing of same-sex marriage? There is our new banner.
Our new teaching is that our sexuality defines us. This is reductionism, which is simplifying an idea for the purpose of obscuring or distorting it. Historically, it has been the favored tool of tyrants, allowing them to apply a litmus test to identify the heterodox, those of another doctrine or teaching.
Once found out, they can be marginalized, or worse, for deviating from the state-approved groupthink. You refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding? We will impose a fine so stiff it may cripple your business and slap a gag order on you.
This new orthodoxy has been repudiating biblical teaching for some time now; today it is replacing it. Where do Christians find ourselves? Well, to use the catchphrase of the day, we’re on the wrong side of history. Considering the history we as a nation are making, there’s no place I’d rather be . . . but I can’t avoid the signs: “Terra Non Firma” and “Here Be Dragons.”
How do we respond? As always, we take instruction from the Holy Writ.
(Read text.)
You will search the Hebrew Scriptures in vain for the Feast of Dedication, where we find Jesus today. Yahweh did not ordain it.
In 167 B. C. the Syrian Antiochus Epiphanes overran the Jewish capital and polluted the temple, slaughtering on its altar that most odious of animals to the Jews, a pig. He turned the altar of burnt offering into a shrine to the pagan god Zeus. He banned the practice of the Jewish religion. One of his statutes made possession of the Hebrew Bible, or any part of it, a capital offense.
The Jews revolted. The son of a priest, Judas Maccabaeus, or “Judas the Hammer,” took to the mountains and led a campaign of guerrilla warfare that overthrew the invader.
Having retaken their temple, the Jews purified it and rededicated it on the 25th day of Kislev, the lunar month that corresponds to December, in the year 164. The celebration lasted eight days and ended with a decree that an eight-day Feast of Dedication beginning on 25 Kislev should be held each year. The Hebrew word for “dedication” is Hanukkah.
It was also known as the Feast of Lights because the Jews lit candles and lamps in their homes to symbolize that the right to worship, as the historian Josephus reported, “appeared to us at a time when we hardly dared hope for it.”
And “it was winter,” a detail probably added to explain why Jesus was walking under cover of Solomon’s porch rather than in one of the open courts, a significant matter because this was the setting in which, after the resurrection, the disciples would gather to proclaim Jesus as the Christ.
As we enter the story, in the minds of many the divinity of Jesus remains an open question. The account of the Good Shepherd discourse preceding this passage ended with mention of a dispute between those who alleged that the backwoods rabbi Jesus was demon-possessed and others who replied that His miracles argued otherwise.
Now, “the Jews” – probably again referring to the leaders – have had enough of this pussy-footing around. They put the issue in straightforward terms: “How long do You keep us in doubt? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”
We might sympathize with their frustration but for one thing. We know what Jesus knew: It makes no difference what He says or how He says it; these scoffers will not believe on Him.
In His conversation with the Samaritan woman, He revealed Himself as Messiah. We know from the synoptic gospels that He did the same with His inner circle. But in broader Jewish contexts He never gives a plain declaration of His deity. For the Jews, the title “Messiah” is freighted with political and military overtones He wishes to avoid.
More than that, though, He has said more than enough already to disclose His deity . . . to those with ears to hear. Did we not just hear Him say, when He called Himself the Good Shepherd, that He will lay down His life and take it up again? Who but God can do that?
No, neither plain speech nor gilded oratory will bring the skeptics round. Neither in that day nor in this one. Those sheep that do not belong to the Good Shepherd do not hear His voice. It will do no good for Him to shout.
To His own sheep, however, Jesus gives . . . what? He has spoken before of life “to the full,” of “abundant life.” He has wrapped up this gift in metaphors – water, bread, light, good pasture. Now He spills it out in naked language: “And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish . . .”
We’re not going to die, you and I. We should probably stop right here and ponder the implications of that statement in silent meditation. I’ll go on, of course, for I am a preacher . . . and one who wants to get paid.
But consider what our Lord said not only in terms of what it means for us but also what it says about Him. Hello? Anybody home? He said He gives eternal life. Can Billy Graham do that?
But wait. There’s more. Every word He utters, every act He performs, is an expression of the Father’s will. If you believe Me incapable of delivering on My promises, will you hold the Father impotent as well?
To argue with Me is to argue with the Father. To agree with Me is to agree with the Father. The Son has eternal life and He shares it with those whom the Father has designated and dedicated.
Now comes the hammer: “I and My Father are one.”
Oh, my, He’s gone and done it now. The Jews, who said they wanted straight talk, head straight for their inexhaustible rock pile to stone Him. And the theologians head to their word processors to bury us.
Bear with me for a moment for a small taste of Greek. The language has three genders. Jesus does not here use the masculine for “one.” If He had, He would have eradicated the distinction proclaimed in 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
They are two. So it is that the Father could send the Son and the Son could obey the Father and pray to Him.
Instead of the masculine He uses the neuter, which accommodates a level of abstraction and preserves the distinction and sets out the unity of their wills. Because the Son is utterly obedient, His will aligns perfectly with the Father’s. This might be a claim a human could make to describe his conduct for a short time with no suggestion of a unity of essence with God.
We take it as more than that because of the context. John’s purpose, we must never forget, is to reveal Jesus as the Christ, as God the Son. His gospel achieves a crescendo in chapter 20 with Doubting Thomas’ stirring confession: “My Lord and my God.”
Now for the third time the Jewish leaders try to kill Him, and in each case their motive is His claim of divinity. Their insistence that He speak plainly is beginning to sound like a punch line: We have twice before attempted to execute You for making Yourself God. Now, we demand to know: Are you or are you not saying you’re God?
I wouldn’t want these characters on a jury in traffic court and they’re sitting in judgment of the Master of the universe . . . or they think they are.
On another point, however, their confusion is genuine. They believe Him to be engaging in blasphemous self-exaltation in elevating His status to that of God. In fact, the second Adam is not replicating the sin of the first, a man trying to become God.
Instead, He is performing the most humble act in history. He has always been God. Now He puts on human flesh and becomes man. To what purpose? To be despised and rejected by men. To give Himself as a ransom for many. To humble Himself to the point of death, even death on a cross.
What’s more, these leaders are zealous for their jealous God. The shema from Deuteronomy (6:4), which opens every temple service, rings in their ears: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!” Yet they are not literate enough in their own Scriptures to grasp that Jesus is not presenting Himself as another God in competition with Yahweh but as the Messiah Yahweh promised to send.
And why should they be so alarmed over His claims? Their own Bible – specifically Psalm 82:6 – applies the word “elohim,” “gods,” to men, in this case Israel’s leaders with divinely ordained responsibilities.
If men can be called gods, how much more fitting that the One Yahweh sanctified and sent should be so identified.
If they will not believe His words, should they not believe His works – not merely the miracles but all that He has done because all has been consistent with the Father’s revealed will? Yet they do not believe. They try again to seize Him and again they fail. His hour has not yet come.
This is internecine strife, Jew vs. Jew, and there’s a lesson in it for our broader church today. While the Jews are bickering and scheming, outside forces are bearing down to crush them. Judas the Hammer drove the Syrians out, but fewer than a hundred years later Israel found herself under the heel of Rome.
In fewer than four decades following the events we’re studying, in A. D. 70, the Romans will sack Jerusalem. The Jews will scatter and they will not regain sovereignty in their land of promise until 1948.
And they have not reinstituted temple sacrifices to this day because a Muslim shrine occupies the place where the altar of burnt offering once stood.
In 21st-century America, freedom of worship is under attack. It requires no hyperactive imagination to squint into the future and spy a day in which a pastor will bring the wrath of the state down on his head for refusing to officiate at a same-sex wedding.
Or a day in which the tax exemption for churches is rescinded. Less support for the needy from the church will mean more dependence on the government, the keeper of the new orthodoxy and nursemaid of the citizenry.
The real issue is how we understand worship. The secular culture around us understands it to be an hour of preaching and singing, with maybe a prayer or two thrown in, on a Sunday morning. In the Bible, a worshipful life is a life dedicated to God, every hour of every day.
This was the view of the faithful Jews in the second century before Christ. Their dress, their diet, their legal system, their way of life in its entirety shouted their devotion to Yahweh. And Antiochus Epiphanes resolved to stamp it out.
The sovereign was an aficionado of all things Greek and, after a peaceful approach to introducing Greek ideas, customs and religion met stiff resistance, he invoked in Israel a campaign of Hellenization by terror.
Ancient historians were notorious for inflating numbers but it’s probably no exaggeration to say tens of thousands of Jews died and as many were sold into slavery. The ban on the Hebrew Scriptures was only the beginning of his draconian measures.
Antiochus made it illegal to circumcise a child. Mothers who defied the ban were crucified with their children hanging around their necks. He profaned the temple courts and turned its chambers into brothels. He emptied its treasury.
What will we see? What will our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren encounter? Fay Voshell wrote on the “American Thinker” website:
“Absolute sexual ‘freedom’ now heads up a new Bill of Rights. Now the federal government will proceed to do everything possible to promulgate the new faith. Some may protest, saying the Left’s promulgation of the LGBT movement as well as the federal government’s endorsement of the special interest group has been and still is about civil rights. Not so.
“The extremists of the LGBT movement display all the characteristics of a cultlike religion, including opposing critical thinking, severely penalizing any opposition, demanding complete and unwavering acceptance of its doctrines, putting loyalty to the cult above family and any other institution, including the Church, disallowing any member the right to change one’s mind and leave or seek change without dire consequences, as well as essentially demanding complete capitulation of conscience of doubtful converts.”
Yes, she is arguing that this sexual revolution seeks not only to drive out traditional American religion but also to replace it. The LGBT wave offers America hedonism as its creed and the orgy as its worship. Fay Voshell adds:
“Just as importantly, the LGBT movement deals with ultimate questions belonging to theology. The movement holds to theological doctrines concerning the nature of the human being, sexual identity and behavior, the definition of marriage, the family and the place of children, the role of government, and the transformation of traditional American institutions and documents adhering to Christian principles, particularly the Church and the US Constitution.
“It has set itself up as a new sexual orthodoxy that usurps the place of orthodox Christianity and Judaism. In brief, the establishment of the new state orthodoxy, the genesis of which can be found in ancient pagan phallic cults, is the culmination of several generations of efforts to displace Christianity and Judaism in America.
“Now that the modern sexual creed is woven into the very fabric of the executive and judicial branches, both will accelerate attempts to promulgate the sex cult, increasingly targeting Orthodox Christians and Jews.”
This, beloved, is the reality we confront. Diversity has its limitations as a political philosophy. People who are not in a coma register at some level that if everyone’s truth is equally valid, no truth is really true. Atheism, likewise: The absence of something makes a poor rallying cry. “Up with no God”? It falls a bit flat.
But the revolutionaries have found their float all the same. They’re parading it through the public schools even now, and they’re not stopping at contraception. The children must be educated about anal sex so those who choose to practice it can do so safely. Homosexuality is just another lifestyle option. And so on.
What must we do? We return to Scripture, and we resist. The Hebrew midwives of Exodus 1 did not murder male babies according to the Egyptian royal decree; they hid them instead. Daniel and his faithful friends did not knuckle under to the demand that they worship pagan gods.
Peter and John did not capitulate under pressure to desist from proclaiming the name of Jesus as the name above all names, telling the authorities, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
Following these heroes of the faith, we resist. So doing, we acknowledge that when persecution comes our Lord may intervene on our behalf, as He did for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and He may allow us to be crucified upside-down, as He did Peter.
Hear these words from Cardinal Francis George, former Archbishop of the Diocese of Chicago:
"I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history."
The days of cheap faith are far spent. On one soon-coming day, it will cost dear to be a Christian. Amen.