Kallen saarnoja syksyllä 2002

“I hate your religious feasts, I will not delight in your sacred ceremonies; I will not accept your sacrifices and offerings” says the Lord God of Hosts — but why?

Amos is the earliest prophet with a book of his own in the Bible. He lived two two and half centuries after the first kings Saul and David in the southern part of the Holy Land. He did not belong to the powerful of his time. He was a common man — but unlike the most common men he  was not able to keep his mouth. He saw the social injustice of his time: the rich and powerful exploited the people and gave the impression to fulfill the will of God with their ceremonial purity. They kept the religious festivals and the offerings ordered by the Law and the tradition, nevertheless, Amos spoke against them — God made Amos speak against them!

It was not only Amos but it was God himself who saw the injustice among His people. And he gave Amos the task to speak out His will, His priorities: justice and righteousness are more important than the correct cult: “Let justice roll like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

As Amos compared justice with a rolling river and righteousness with an ever-flowing stream, it must have given his audience a very strong impression. They were people of a very dry country where many streams were and still are dry the most time. They were people who did not take access to fresh water as granted. And this man, this prophet told them that God values justice and righteousness like living water.

I have studied John Calvin’s understanding of the Law. In the structure of his commentary on the Law of God I found an interesting hierarchy. We can see the Law as a set of circles around one centre. The circles close to the centre are very general and at the same time in a great harmony with the centre, and the circles more far away give statutes for very specific situations.

The centre is God’s will, and the first circle around it is the first verbal expression of the will of God in the commandment to love God above all and to love one’s neighbours as oneself. Then comes the circle of the Ten Commandments. You will further find moral law and laws of different nations and so on. And you will also find the ceremonial law of the Old Covenant with its regulations for the cult. If regulations of an outer circle are incompatible with each other, regulations of an inner circle will decide what is right and what is wrong.. And it is right there where concepts of justice and righteousness: they are closely related with love of God and love of our neighbours, and so they have a high priority over, let us say, ceremonial regulations. Justice and righteousness belong to the very essence of the law, and so they should be part in all the regulations of different laws. Justice and righteousness are actualisations of love.

I find it very understandable that God announces through His prophet His dissatisfaction with His people in a time when there are oppressed and exploited among them, when the powerful concentrate themselves to the purity of the cult and do not want to increase justice and righteousness.

But why was it necessary for God to send a prophet to tell the powerful that what they did was not right? They had the written Law of God, not quite in the form we have it in the Old Testament, but anyway they had.  But they were not able to see what was more and what less important. And they were not able to see their own situation. When we follow the history in the Bible we notice that they were not the only who made those mistakes: There were generation after generation until the days of Jesus.

And I am sure, there have been  generation after generation since the days of Jesus, too. Perhaps we also belong to those who do not see what is really important. Perhaps we also need a prophet to show us ways of justice and righteousness. At least we need God’s Spirit to guide us in this life and to make it possible for us to let justice roll like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

For some of us today’s feast of Saint Michael and All Angels might be a less known or even unknown one. In Finland this is anyway one of the greater feasts in the year of the church. Today there have been services for families, mostly for families with small children in churches all over Finland.

In the Finnish-Lutheran tradition angels have been made a matter of children. In our new lectionary there is only one gospel, the one we just heard; a gospel of children and angels. It is a good combination in a way: for children angels are more real, more present in their minds as for us who we are more adults. And their guardian angels have lot to do — I can tell that from my family: thirteen months old Johannes enjoying his newly learnt skill of walking and the almost eight years old boy forgetting to cycle on the right side of the street. But also older ones need guardian angels. I can think of the fourteen years old who managed to break two bicycles in two weeks. Well, fortunately the eldest with his seventeen years is still too young to have a driving licence...

But there is also something less clever in the combination of angels and children. I mean the attitude to push angels into the world of fairy tales. The attitude to consider as real only those parts of the Creation, only those objects we can somehow measure. We are modern people of the twenty first century, we are children of Enlightenment, citizens of the information society, aren’t we? Our view of reality is the view of science, isn’t it? But let us not forget that we are Christians. In our great Creed we affirm our faith in God as “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” There is in the Creation much that we cannot see. Like angels — who however can sometimes become visible.

I find also another disadvantage in the combination of angels and children: it makes us too often think angels only as guardian angels. That is pity because in the Bible they mostly have quite another function. The basic function of angels is actually hidden in the word itself: the basic meaning of the Greek word for an angel, angelos,  is a messenger.  Usually angels bring messages from God. And trough their messages they also protect us sometimes.

My favourite angel story in the Bible is none of those we heard today but a story with a donkey who saw the angel of the Lord. It occurred in the time when the people of Israel was on its way to the Promised Land and had to pass through the areas of different nations. The king of one of those nations was afraid of Israel and wanted help from a prophet called Balaam.  The king sent his envoys to Balaam and after some time Balaam promised to come to the king who wanted him to curse Israel.

So the next morning Balaam saddled his donkey and went with the Moabite leaders.
God was angry that Balaam was going, and as Balaam was riding along on his donkey, accompanied by his two servants, the angel of the Lord stood in the road to bar his way.
When the donkey saw the angel standing there holding a sword, it left the road and turned into the fields. Balaam beat the donkey and brought it back onto the road.
Then the angel stood where the road narrowed between two vineyards and had a stone wall on each side.
When the donkey saw the angel, it moved over against the wall and crushed Balaam's foot against it. Again Balaam beat the donkey.
Once more the angel moved ahead; he stood in a narrow place where there was no room at all to pass on either side.
This time, when the donkey saw the angel, it lay down. Balaam lost his temper and began to beat the donkey with his stick.
Then the Lord gave the donkey the power of speech, and it said to Balaam, 'What have I done to you? Why have you beaten me these three times?'
Balaam answered, 'Because you have made a fool of me! If I had a sword, I would kill you.'
The donkey replied, 'Am I not the same donkey on which you have ridden all your life? Have I ever treated you like this before?' 'No,' he answered.
 Then the Lord let Balaam see the angel standing there with his sword; and Balaam threw himself face downward on the ground.
The angel demanded, 'Why have you beaten your donkey three times like this? I have come to bar your way, because you should not be making this journey.
But your donkey saw me and turned aside three times. If it hadn't, I would have killed you and spared the donkey.'
Balaam replied, 'I have sinned. I did not know that you were standing in the road to oppose me; but now if you think it is wrong for me to go on, I will return home.'
But the angel said, 'Go on with these men, but say only what I tell you to say.' So Balaam went on with them. And he did not curse but blessed  Israel.

The donkey recognized the messenger of the Lord immediately but it took a long time for the prophet to see the messenger and even longer to understand the message.

Perhaps we need our donkeys every now and then in order to receive messages from God for our lives. Our ways and directions, how well prepared they might be, are not always God’s ways and directions for us. Sometimes He sends His messengers, His angels to close our way into a wrong and bad direction. If He then stops us and has to stop first our donkeys, He shows His care for us through what first seems to be a failure for us.

The gospel of St. John is the latest of the four gospels. It has been written around AD 100, probably somewhere in Syria. We do not know exactly when it was written but anyway some twenty to fifty years earlier Titus had conquered Jerusalem and the Jews were driven away from Palestine. The upper class Sadducean understanding of the Jewish religion had lost its influence because there was neither temple nor political organs for the people any more. The Judaism was from then on developed by Pharisees. The author of the gospel has known the three previous gospels with their similar view, so called synoptic tradition. He has also seen that Judaism was developing into a direction more and more distanced from Christianity. Although Jew by birth, he has given up the hope that many of his people would recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the long expected Messiah. At the time he wrote down several stories he knew about the Man from Nazareth, the majority of Christians were of gentile origin.

I wanted to give this background information for the Gospel of St. John because today’s gospel reading brought us in one of the controversies between Jesus and Pharisees described by John. The story of the healing of a man blind from birth by Jesus on a Sabbath covers the whole 9th chapter of the gospel. And in the verses just before today’s reading John explains one of the aspects of the conflict: The Jewish authorities had already agreed that anyone who said he believed that Jesus was the Messiah would be expelled from the synagogue. The explanation illustrates how “the Jews” represent the unbelievers.

The point of the reading or the whole chapter of the gospel is not the controversy between Jesus and Jews, but discussion on unbelief, doubt and faith. Or how we response to the acts of God.

In the story there are those who acknowledge that God has revealed himself in the past. For them there are a whole lot of formal criteria to judge whether someone follows the order God has given or not. If and when nay of the rules has not been kept the whole action is wrong, regardless its results. It would be easy to blame such unbelievers, but on the other hand, has God ever revealed himself to them in another way, in a more direct, more concrete way than in the Scriptures of the past generations?

Well, in their case, God has revealed himself, He has come to them, He is among them in flesh. But that is something beyond their understanding. Anyway, I think that it is not justified to blame them for their unbelief. We know and we believe that the faith in God cannot be build with any human means but only by God himself. It is God the Holy Spirit who has given us the faith in Creator and ever acting Life-Giver, in Redeemer and Risen Lord, and in Counsellor and Vivificator

But what I consider as justified is to blame the unbelievers of today’s gospel, the scholars and teachers in God’s law and in God’s will, is to blame them for their narrow minded understanding of the essential. And the more I read in the Bible, the main source for our knowledge on God’s will, the more convinced I am: the essential is love: God’s merciful and loving acts towards us, our gratitude and love towards God, and our sharing and caring love towards our neighbours.

But if so, the unbelievers might ask, if so, are allowed to break against the explicit will of God even for love? That would be a justified question, wouldn’t it? On Sabbath you are not allowed to work says God in his Law. Jesus made mud to heal the blind man, so he worked, and so he did not keep the Law. How should we answer? Jesus made mud, Jesus worked on Sabbath because he wanted to let one man feel, receive the love of God.

The man blind from birth was in a very special way touched by God. He must have heard some of the self-revelation of God in the Scriptures, but now God himself came to him and healed him. And God did not just open his eyes but his heart, his understanding, his life: God gave him faith, God became present in his life, for him.

And that is what we need, too. We need God’s touch, we need God’s self-revelation, we need God to be present and so to be real for us, in our lives. If He is not present and real, we remain blind, we remain in unbelief of the fallen world. But His presence opens us to understand and to share His love.

Pax et bonum! Peace and goodness!

That is the greeting Franciscan brothers and sisters use, and it has become a greeting used by pilgrims, too. Its origins lie in the gospel we just heard: “Peace be with this house” were the seventy two supposed to say when they entered into a house.

With this gospel I can’t help thinking of St Francis of Assisi: Go. Do not take anything with you. Go and preach. Eat and drink what people give you. I think he must have had this gospel in his mind as he started his mission for almost eight centuries ago. At least we know for sure that he turned his mission into preaching and begging when he had heard a sermon on a parallel of this gospel, St. Matthew’s account of Jesus sending out the Twelve. It is worth of mentioning that the American Lutheran calender attributes Francis of Assisi as a “renewer of the Church”.

But St. Francis and Franciscans are not the only servants of God whom this gospel brings into my mind. In August I spent one week in the middle of American Presbyterianism, attending a congress on Calvin research at  Princeton Theological Seminary. On our excursion the minister of the Old Tennant Church told us how there was a network of correspondence serving travelling preachers before the American revolution.  The network stretched from New England to Georgia and organized the trips of those preachers: schedules, means of transportation, accommodation, and so on. The preachers did not need to care for those practical matters, and they were able to concentrate themselves on preaching. And so, one of them had at the Old Tennant Church a congregation of five thousands listening to him.

St Francis and Franciscans represent one side of the ministry ordered by Jesus, the people in the network of correspondence the other side. The  former followed the way of the seventy two sent by Jesus, the others fulfilled the task of housing those proclaiming the Kingdom of God.

In their examples we see that it was not only two thousands years ago proclamation needed all people possible, but it was so much later and it is so today, too.

And like in the past, it is also today not always easy and successful to proclaim the Kingdom of God. The gospel is not a consumer-oriented product, and the consumer is not always right when it comes to gospel. Sometimes the gospel is inherently offensive, because it deals with the need to turn to God and understand the debt sin produces before God. It means admitting to wrongs. Nevertheless, God is at work to change and open up hearts. The disciples’ responsibility is to preach and pray, and the results are God’s concern.

Preach and pray. The two verbs refer to the two sides of the ministry. There are those who preach and proclaim the gospel in words and deeds, and there are those who take care of their needs — also pray for them.  Together they work, together we work as the body of Christ in this world. Together we bring the Kingdom of God ever closer to people we live with. Together we share God’s blessing, and together we distribute His blessing further.

Let us pray:

God of the covenant,
in our baptism you called us to proclaim the coming of your kingdom.
Give us courage like you gave the apostles,
that we may faithfully witness to your love and peace in every circumstance of life;
in the name of Jesus Christ, our Redeemer.
Amen.

“But love covers over all wrongs,” says the antiphon for today’s psalm, a vers from the Proverbs.

But do we have the courage needed for love? For example, if we notice  that some of our brothers or sister, that is some of the members of our religious group does something that at least seems to be against the will of God, have we courage to go to him or her and tell that we think he or she has done wrong? I ask this because Jesus advices us exactly to do so. We heard him saying “If your brother sins against you”, but in some manuscripts the words “against you” have been omitted. It is not only when we have experienced something wrong, but when have noticed a wrong doing we should react.

But do we do as we should? I think we are more in the line of Jesus’ contemporaries who preferred to stay back in a humid way. What were they to mix themselves in other one’s business with God? Or what are we?

Btu we are, we should be loving and caring brothers and sister who do not want a single one among us to get lost. It is not a question of using power if we do it like Jesus said: first there should be a discussion just between the one showing the fault and the one having committed it. So the honour of the wrong doer is saved. It is good if that is all. But often the message is not understood. Then the next step applies: two or three go together to clear the fault. And if that doesn’t help, only then the church, the congregation can act.

Is that church discipline or loving care? I think that in the Finnish and also in Western European context in general there is no church discipline any more in the major evangelical people’s churches.  In a way I find it also good so, because often, through the centuries, the church discipline has been visible in the form of punishments. But, on the other hand, the loving care, the love that covers over all wrongs has disappeared with the disappearance of the church discipline. We do not find forms for practising the guiding love needed every now and then when one of our brothers or sister is making a mess of his or her life. How to warn, how to guide without hurting?

And how do we even know what is “sin”, what is “fault”? For some decades ago there were patterns telling what behaviour indicated sin. But nowadays, the patterns are broken. Nowadays we have to look behind the behaviour: whether something promotes or hinders one’s relation to God. It has made things more complicated but it has also brought us closer to the comprehensive view of sin that is present in the gospels  — and in the teaching of our Lord. “Sin” is not predominantly  certain deeds but the attitude of life that separates from God. And against that attitude we have to fight — also for one another!

Or even more important: we fight for our lives being in harmony with God’s will. And they cannot be in harmony without means God has provided us. That’s why we need prayer in which we discuss with God and in which we bring our thanksgiving and our needs before him. That’s why we need forgiveness which cleanses our lives of  separation from God and from our neighbours. That’s why we need love that covers over all wrongs. That’s why we need faith He grants us.

So, let us affirm our Christian faith:

The All Saints’ Day is in the Lutheran Church of Finland nowadays actually a combination of two traditional feast of the Western Church: of the All Saints’ Day on November 1st and of the All Souls’ Day with the commemoration of the deceased  on November 2nd. Since 1950's this feast is celebrated on the Saturday between October 31st and November 6th. The Lutheran Church in America counts All Saints’ Day to the Lesser Festivals; in the Anglican Church it is one of the Holy Days, and the American Presbyterian calender celebrates it on the first Sunday in November. And the Evangelical Churches in Germany have commemoration of the deceased on the last Sunday of the Church year; they call it “Ewigkeitssonntag”, Eternity Sunday.

Because we have our service only on Sunday, we celebrate All Siants’ Day today, even though it was actually already yesterday. Yesterday there were in churches usually two services: the main service more focussed on the theme of All Saints, God’s people on the earth and in the heavenly home, in the morning, and then, in the evening, a vigil with the commemoration of the deceased of the latest twelve months. Their names were read and for each of them a candle was lighted. So was it also here, at the Cathedral. And if you visited a graveyard yesterday evening you saw candles everywhere, at graves and a sea of candles at two Memorial stones: that of those buried in Carelia and that of those buried elsewhere.

I think we have on this All Saints’ Day a special reason to join what was expressed in the services yesterday evening. Among the names read at this Cathedral was also Ingrid Hollingworth. As many of you remember, she died last year at Henrik’s Church just after our Christmas Carols’ service. And she was one of the very active members of this congregation. At her funeral service in January at the same Henrik’s Church where she died we were able to see that it wasn’t just this congregation where she had had her influence.

When we today commemorate Ingrid and other beloved who are not any more among us we also look ahead into the future described by St. John in the Book of Revelation. Once the whole people of God will be gathered together, and they will long for God any more, but God will be immediately with them, with us then. Then there will be no more death, no more grief or crying or pain. The old order of the things ha passed away, tells the Revelation.

For us, who live in the world so full of grief and crying and pain and death, all that is still a promise. Fortunately it is not a promise of this world but a promise of God who in and as Jesus Christ has already fulfilled his promise of the Redeemer for all the nations. Just as the prophets of the Old Covenant were not able to know when the promise of the Redeemer would be fulfilled, we cannot know when the promise of the new order will be fulfilled. But we wait for it, we long for it all the days we live as God’s people in this world. And when this world is over for us we still belong to God’s people, and the longing for the new order of things in the heavenly Jerusalem will fill our existence. And even when noone remembers us any more, God will remember us and love us and bring us into the full life of his people of every age in the new reality.

Let us pray.

Eternal God,
neither death nor life can separate us from your love.
Grant that we may serve you faithful here on earth,
and in heaven rejoice with all your saints
who ceaselessly proclaim your glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, forever and ever.
Amen.

November is time of ends. There are no living flowers, no green leaves any more in the nature around us. If we see some leaves left in trees, they are yellow or grey, they show that there is no life in them any more. Here in the southern Finland we can see some green grass but beside of that everything in the nature seems to be dead. The Finnish name for this month, marraskuu, points at that, too. “Marras” means non living, dead. And it is often very dark in November. Now we have got some snow that reflects the tiny light of short November days, but in many years these days are the darkest of the year.

It is not just nature that makes November to time of ends. Last weekend we had All Saints’ Day with the commemoration of the dead. And in two weeks we look ahead when we celebrate the last day of this world,  the day of the second coming of our Lord. The day of the judgement, the day of the end of everything of this creation we live in.

But when we look at the nature and take our time and think of it we notice and we know that those ends of November are not the end of the life. In spring some flowers just pop up from the ground, new leaves grow, there will be green again, green, life everywhere. The earth will turn this side to the sun again — or, like we as Christians know, God provides us another season of life after the winter.

And there again, it is not just the nature! In the beginning of November we, as Christians, commemorate especially those who have lived and died in Christ, our Lord and Saviour. And at the end of November we celebrate Christ the King, whose reign will once be total, not any more shadowed by the imperfection of this fallen world. This world, this creation will pass, but His reign will have no end.

So we, as Christians, we should not be afraid of the ends we experience in these November days. “For what my Father wants is that all who see the Son and believe in him should have eternal life,” says today’s gospel.  With those words Jesus reveals the will of God. He is the incarnation of God’s will. In him God’s love came into this fallen world. In him people can see and know and follow God’s love. In him and through him God has called and still calls together His holy people from the nations of this fallen world. His will is that many people would see the Son and would so be saved. His will is that many people would have a spring of the eternal life after the November of their lives.

As Christians we may trust that we belong to those the Father has given to the Son. As Christians we are allowed to go to Christ and throw  ourselves on his mercy. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, for us and for our salvation he died on the cross, for us and for our salvation he broke the gates of the death and the grave and opened the everlasting life for those the Father sends to follow him, for us, too.

Let us pray.

God of all living,
in the resurrection of Jesus Christ
you have given us the promise of life
which death itself cannot destroy.
In the strength of this unshakable promise
give us a new heart to live, even now, as your new creation.
We ask this through your Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

The very first Christian generation, the apostles and their contemporaries had experienced how God fulfilled His promises in Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah. So they thought that the promise Jesus gave just before he ascended into the heaven, the promise of his coming in the glory would be fulfilled very soon. In their understanding it was a question of months or years, not of decades, not of centuries, not of millenniums. So the apostles hurried into all corners of the world known for them to do their part, to preach the gospel of the  Redeemer of all mankind.

Many of the Christians of that very first generation and most of the apostles died martyrs for their faith without seeing the coming of the Lord in the glory, but that was not any problem for the Christians. Christ himself had prophesied that his people would suffer for the faith in him and in the One who sent him. But there were also those who died a natural death, and that was a problem for their brothers and sisters in Christ: what would happen to those who had lived in faith but were not any more alive waiting for the coming of the Christ? Months passed and years passed and believers got older and older and then died, and He did not come back in the glory. Would they have their portion of the eternal life, would they enter his Kingdom in the glory?

That must have been a problem for those first Christians — until St. Paul got a message from God, a message he wrote down in the oldest scripture of the New Testament, only 15 years after the resurrection and  ascension of the Lord — and rewrote some years later in the passage we heard as the second reading today: “For just as all people die because of their union with Adam, in the same way all will be raised to life because of their union with Christ. But each one will be raised in proper order: Christ, first of all; then, at the time of his coming, those who belong to him.”

That was good news for those whose family members and friends had lived waiting for the coming of the Christ and then died before he came. And it is good news for who we live two thousands years later, still waiting for the fulfilment of our Lord’s promise to come back.

But what kind of day do we wait for? In the church of Masku where I ministered seven and half years there is a painting from early 18th century showing how people imagined the coming of the Lord to be: the Last Judgement, some are called to the eternal life and the others are sent into the flames of the infernal fire.  It shows a vivid imagination working on one part of what our Lord has revealed about the day of his coming. That part has often dominated thoughts of the last day of this world. One of the famous hymns connected with this last Sunday of the  year of the church is Dies irae, the day of anger. And we could find a whole lot of other examples of that kind.

For me, one question, one distinction remains: When we think of the coming of our Lord in the glory, do we think of an the awful end of all that is do or we think  the end of all awful that is? Even though we, as Christians, are already now citizens of another reality than the one we see and touch and hear and smell and taste, we have here so many things and persons we like that we are afraid of an end of this reality for us. So we may see in the end an awful end of everything. But, as Christians, we also realize that all awful that belongs to this reality will then have an end. Then the fallen world will exist no more. Then sin will not any more have influence and power in our lives because it will not exist any more. Then all hate and violence and oppression and death and all lack of love will not exist any more.

The end of all awful, that is what happens when our Lord comes in the glory.  At the time of his coming, those who belong to him will be raised to life because of their union with him, witnesses the Apostle. And it will not be the imperfect life in the fallen reality, but the perfect life of God’s reality.