Sermon Tone Analysis

God says so many things, yet look around.

He says He’s with us always.

Where?

When did He last prove it?

He says He works out all things for the good of those who love Him? Where?

When?

From infancy on we sing, “He’s got the whole world in His hands,” yet a world ready to spiral into another Middle Eastern conflict, with the hint of Iranian nukes and Russian enmity doesn’t seem God’s control.

I look at God’s Words and I doubt.

So many of them seem to be so desperately, defiantly untrue.

John the Baptist wrestled with this.

Sitting in prison, arrested by Herod, John got confused.

He sees Jesus gently preaching repentance instead of chopping down oaks of unrighteousness.

He sees Jesus opening blind eyes not sending down fire from the heavens.

He sees Jesus wandering around homeless, not marching like an emperor.

And he asks, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”

In response, Jesus points to the prophet Isaiah, who said that the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, the mute speaking, the lepers cured, the dead raised, those very things would accompany the arrival of God with us, God the Savior!

John alone didn’t wrestle with this.

The great crowds that followed Jesus did too.

They ate the miraculous food He provided from the loaves and the fish and then decided to crown Him king.

He escaped.

They followed.

He chastised them for seeking only earthly things, and then said, “Eat my flesh.

Drink my blood.

Believe in me and you will live.”

And they left.

Jesus turned to His disciples and asked, “You do not want to leave too, do you?”

To which Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the words of eternal life!”

John wrestles with doubt because his eyes don’t see what he expects to see.

Jesus says, “Appearances can be deceiving.

Let me show you what you should be looking for.”

He takes John back to the Word of God.

Jesus preaches the Word.

The crowds leave, because they don’t hear what they hope to hear or see from Jesus what they want to see.

They want more bread.

More power.

More everything.

Jesus says, “I’ll give you the eternal bread, the eternal wine, eternal life, just not where you expect to find it.

Appearances can be deceiving.”

This time the disciples of Jesus stand firm and appeal to the Word: “You have the Words of eternal life.”

Putting together everything you know about Peter and the disciples, you could almost imagine Peter saying, “I don’t get it, Jesus.

It’s beyond my understanding.

It doesn’t look like much, but I guess it’s everything.”

We can do nothing better.

The apostle Paul today, coming near to the end of his magisterial letter to the Romans says, “Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”

This despite appearances.

It’s not uncommon to hear critics of the Bible reduce our book to nothing but a bunch of stories and fables.

Genesis is myth.

Exodus, Numbers, Joshua and Judges teach us about God the genocidal maniac.

Most of the Gospels didn’t happen that way.

Paul invented Christianity as we know it.

While we reject those radical rejections of God’s Word, we still wrestle to find teachable points in everything written in the past.

Everything?

Really?

All of it?

Those obscure laws in Leviticus?

The never ending words of the prophets?

The dark and mysterious words of Revelation?

All of it was written to teach us?

To give us endurance?

To encourage us?

To give us hope?

Yes.

It was.

Every word.

Because every word testifies about Christ and every word that speaks of Christ grants us hope.

No matter how it appears.

Hence our seemingly rabid obsession with preserving and defending the written Word of God.

For God didn’t write it for no purpose.

He wrote it to give us His gifts.

If we deny that it’s God’s Words, if we remove the divine nature from the Scriptures and says it’s just man’s words filled with mistakes, if we start picking and choosing which of the words we like and which we don’t, then we’ll lose hold of all of God’s gifts.

Either we have God’s Word, or we don’t.

Either we have the truth, or we don’t.

And it’s God’s Word that is truth, as Jesus says, not our words, not our thoughts, not our reason or strength.

Our reason and strength get us nowhere except lost.

We find ourselves attracted to this rabbit hole and that pet theory.

Our reason and strength turn us into blasphemers, lowering God to our own level, to our own expectations, that is, inventing a God out of our own minds instead of letting God be who He says He is.

Our reason and strength turn the true God into some Golden Calf.

Not satisfied with God as He is, as He shows Himself, as He gives Himself in Christ, we build a pathetic version of God to bow down to.

We saw each of these in our readings for today.

Jesus spoke of lost sheep.

Sheep wander off.

So do we.

We begin munching in other fields.

We stop while the rest of the herd moves on.

We decide not to listen to the shepherd any more.

Paul rehearsed his well-known biography.

In his rabid hatred he sanctioned the murder of Christians.

Moses records the incident of the Golden Calf.

Israel, having heard nothing from the Lord and seen nothing of Moses for 40 days, invents and worships a false god – at the foot of God’s very own mountain!

In each case, sinners used the deceiving appearance of the Word of God as an excuse to justify their own sins.

As do we.

God’s Words seem less than powerful on their own.

We need to jazz them up with something.

God’s Words make no sense, we need to attack them.

Our God isn’t so powerful as that god, we need a new one.

The truth is it’s not just the appearance of God’s Word that deceives.

The grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence.

You thought it would be fun and liberating to wander away from the Shepherd for a while.

Turns out it wasn’t.