The Lutheran Review

God's Knitting Project

By Rev. Ronald Jansen

“What are you knitting?” I would ask when visiting a shut in, if I saw the needles, yarn and a partially knit project in a basket. Often, the person would answer, “Oh, I’m working on an afghan for my granddaughter’s wedding.” Or they might be knitting a baby covering for a great grandchild.

Now let your imagine run loose for a bit and picture God knitting you together. The author of Psalm 139 discovered. “You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.”

I may have let my imagination run too far when it pictured God in a mother’s womb with 14 inch needles casting on and binding off on the way to kitting a human baby.

This coming Sunday is Sanctity of Life Sunday. I received an email this morning reporting on a study at a circuit pastor’s conference emphasizing that Jesus himself passed through all the stages of our existence from conception to death. Someone in the group pointed out that “what Jesus did not take on, he did not redeem.” The email continues thanking the Lord that Jesus did take on every part of our life. Jesus redeeming and rescuing work is most significant for the unborn, the senile, and every stage of in between, including the one you are in right now.

Pray the Lord helps us to see others (including ourselves) as being significant, not because of what we do or don’t do, not because of how we look, not due to our size, not because of our abilities or even potential abilities, but rather because in God’s view we are worth the ultimate price, the life and death of Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord.

Reading Mark's Gospel

bout 35 years ago when we went to the three year lectionary series a member of the congregation I was serving expressed a concern about the gospel reading regarding Jesus‘ baptism. He wondered why they changed the translation. He said it used to be, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” However, I had read, “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.”

Until that year we had always heard the account of Jesus’ baptism from the gospel of Matthew. However, that year, as occurred in our services this year, we heard the account from the Gospel of Mark. That parishioner should be commended for his sharp eared listening.

In fact Mark’s rather sparse account contains other differences from Matthew and Luke. In Mark the action moves quickly, thus the frequent use of “immediately“, and the descriptions are often graphic. For instance, the heaven’s don’t just open, they are ripped open. Near the end of the gospel we read that after Jesus death on the cross the curtain in the temple was ripped in two. The Holy Spirit doesn’t just descend on Jesus at His baptism, it descends into Jesus, though the translations don’t always pick up on that.

The Voice also was echoed after Jesus’ death, the centurion standing under the cross announced, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

This all makes me think of a favorite prayer that we don’t use much anymore.

Blessed Lord, who has caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning, grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of Thy holy Word we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Still Christmas

Some years ago I attended a seminar on ministering to alcoholics held at a catholic convent in Waukesha, Wisconsin. It was late January. As we LCMS pastors were settling in that Sunday night we heard the sisters singing Christmas carols in the chapel. We gathered outside the chapel door to listen. When the sisters emerged from the chapel some of our group engaged them in conversation. The sisters said that in their order they kept Christmas in mind until near the end of January. Conversation, and careful negotiation continued during the week. With ground rules carefully laid down the sisters invited us to join them in the chapel on our last evening. With us LCMS pastors sitting on one side of the chapel and the sisters on the other and we joined our voices together in raising praise to God via Christmas carols as the snow lay deep and cold on the outside. That happened nearly 20 years ago.

This year as I was taking down our Christmas decorations, I thought it was time to discard some of them that we hadn’t used in a few years. As I was picking through the assortment of decorations I found several mangers scenes which we had not put up. Well, Becky took them and now the shelf of the bay window is replete with mangers scenes of various sizes and materials.

In the church year Jesus is born on December 25. By this coming Sunday, January 11, he is thirty years old and being baptized by John the Baptizer. But at our house its Christmas revived. That reminds me, I still have one Christmas card to mail.

As the hymn says “Let our gladness have no end, alleluia! For to earth did Christ descend, alleluia! One this day God gave us Christ, His Son to save us; Christ, His Son, to save us.” (LSB 381)

Turn on the Light

“Hey, turn on the lights,” I called out in the opening words of my sermon from the high standing pulpit at St. Martins in Winona, Minnesota. The ushers jerked to attention. They had just dimmed the lights for the sermon, as was still the practice in many Lutheran churches in 1968. Now was this young pastor telling them break with tradition? As I recall, they soon settled back in their chairs. The lights remained dimmed.

My text for my first Epiphany sermon that Sunday was II Corinthians 4:3-6. St. Paul tells us that the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. Unbelievers need someone to turn on the lights for them.

Epiphany is about turning on the Light. In Jesus Christ we possess the only light that will guide people out of the darkness of death into the way of life. We are servants, not only of Christ, but also of those who are in darkness. The same God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The days are already lengthening minute by minute in the evening. This week the morning light will also begin to arrive earlier. In the midst of winter God, the creator of the first light, provides us with a model for our life. Let the light of the new creation in the Gospel shine forth from our hearts in our life and words that those in darkness may begin to see, through us, the face of Jesus.

Luther Preaches on New Year’s Day

With all the sermons and services from thanksgiving to New Year’s Day I have the sense of it being either Saturday or Sunday a least a couple of times a week. There is a chance to catch our breath before we launch into Lent on Feb. 25.

As I thought it time to get back to writing for The Lutheran Review I wondered if Luther might have preached on New Year’s Day also known as the Day of the Circumcision and Naming of Jesus. Not only did he preach but he preached two sermons on the shortest of all Gospel Lessons on January 1, 1531.

The Text: And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived.

Luther’s morning sermon was entitled, “Of the Circumcision of Jesus.”

“This is a short Gospel lesson, and we’ll make a short ‘sermon’ out of it” His short sermon takes up 11 pages.

In typical “Lutherese” he writes, “One lesson we can learn from the old circumcision is this: when God wants to help his people, he sometimes does it in ways that are nothing less than ridiculous as far as human judgment is concerned! Here God established a covenant with a requirement so silly that it’s hard to imagine anything more ridiculous!”

He then makes the same comparison to the Lord’s Supper. “If judged by reason, what is more unreasonable than that in the Lord’s Supper, under the bread and wine, we are eating and drinking the true Body and Blood of Christ for the forgiveness of sins.” It’s the same with holy baptism…A child is sprinkled with water, and thereby sins are washed away and the child is translated from Satan’s kingdom to God’s!”

Luther continues, “When God commands, speaks, does something, you should shut your mouth, fall on your knees and, without further objection, do what he has told you…

The old circumcision was valid only up to the coming of Christ. “He was totally sinless and Lord of the Law. The fact that he was circumcised means that in his case the Law overreached itself and Christ silenced the Law and took away its .power. He did it all for us out of love and in humility, so that we might take it to heart for our comfort. Christ put himself under the Law to redeem us who were under the Law. He has freed us from the Law, (and) we are delivered from sin and death; for where there is redemption from the Law, there is also deliverance from sin and death.”

O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel, our king and our Lord, the anointed for the nations and their Savior: Come and save us, O Lord our God.

The last of the O antiphons is from Isaiah 7:14, “Therefore the Lord will give you this sign; the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.”

God had asked king Ahaz of Judah to ask a sign of the Lord his God in which God would show him that he had nothing to fear from those two burned out stumps of torches of the northern kingdom of Israel and their ally Syria. Ahaz had no need to make an alliance Assyria. After all Ahaz had the Lord his God as his ally. But Ahaz refused God’s offer claiming that he would not test the Lord.

Therefore, God said that he would give him a sign, a child born of a virgin. We don’t know who this child was in the time of Isaiah and Ahaz., However, in the time of Joseph and Mary, the child was named Jesus, God’s Savior. Since his birth at Bethlehem, Jesus, both God and Man, has been Immanuel, God with us, and will be until the age of this world ends. (Matthew 28: 20) After that we will be with Jesus in the heavenly realms forever and ever.

O come, O come Emmanuel,

And ransom captive Israel,

That mourns in lonely exile here

Until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee O Israel.

O King Come

O King of the nations, the ruler they long for, the cornerstone uniting all people: Come and save us all, who You formed out of clay.

A few years ago one of the gifts my wife received from a student was a clay pumpkin.

My wife was about to discard it when our daughter informed her that that pumpkin was indeed a valuable item created by a St. Louis artist. So it was retrieved from the discard pile and placed on display in our house.

When we read the O antiphon above we might wonder why a king would bother with saving a bunch of clay figurines he had formed; especially, when they became so deformed and no longer things of beauty.

Yet not only did the King of kings and Ruler of rulers save us, He gave us clay figures the honor of telling the news that all the deformed clay figures are now saved from the trash heap. God doesn’t want any to be discarded; therefore, He sent Jesus Christ Son of David and son of Mary to live up to His name and save us all.

If there is to be peace in this world and unification in place of division, then it must be based on the foundation of Jesus Christ at who’s coming the Heavenly Host praised God and announced, “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men.”

O come, Desire of nations, bind

In one the hearts of all mankind;

Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,

And be Thyself our King of Peace.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

O Dayspring

O Dayspring, splendor of light everlasting: Come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

It’s hard for us to imagine the era in which the prayer that was turned into the O antiphons was written. Over the centuries tribes such as the Goths (eastern and western) Vandals, Franks, Slavs and Huns from Mongolia, had attacked Western Europe. To the north in British Isles the Celts and Anglo-Saxons ruled. Later the Vikings rampaged through these areas. Society was in upheaval. Slowly each of the groups was converted to Christ, but only after great violence had been suffered.

Out of those dark days came the cry that Christ would return and shine upon those sitting in darkness and under the threat of death, often right out side the monastery or church walls.

We live in a more secure society, but those Christians in the Middle East, in Iraq and Iran, in certain provinces of India, or in several African countries would know the terror that befell the Europeans in the middle Ages.

Had I considered these things this morning I would have sung O come, O come, Emmanuel with more depth of understanding.

O come, Tbou Dayspring from on high,

And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;

Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,

And death’s dark shadows put to flight.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O Key of David

O Key of David and scepter of the house of Israel, You open and no one can close, You close and no one can open: come and rescue the prisoners who are in darkness and the shadow of death.

The one who had the key of David had authority to either admit or exclude people from the king’s presence. He also had the great trust of the king.

Isaiah 22:22 “And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.

These words are applied to Christ in Rev. 3:7.

Christ who in his dying, opened the way to the holy of holies in the temple has given the keys of the kingdom of heaven to the Church, you and me. (Matt. 16:19).

Now we have the great privilege, responsibility and authority to speak Christ’s words of rescue to those who still sit in the darkness of sin and the shadow of eternal death.

Yet we ourselves pray in the hymn verse,

O come, thou Key of David, come,

And open wide our heav’vly home; Make safe the way the leads on high,

And close the .path to misery.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

O Root of Jesse

The antiphon that follows the singing of the Magnificat during the service of Vespers on December 19 is, O Root of Jesse, standing as an ensign before the peoples, before whom all kings are mute, to whom the will do homage: Come quickly to deliver us.

The promise of a branch growing from the root of Jesse in Isaiah 11 is telling us that deliverance for Israel will not come from the royal court of David with all its pomp and glory. Rather the shoot sprouting from the stump of Jess hearkens back to the more humble origins of David’s father who kept flocks of sheep in the environs of Bethlehem.

When the Christ comes He will spring forth from Bethlehem, the hometown of his forefathers.

When the root of Jesse, Jesus Christ, springs forth He shall be the signal that He is the gathering place for all nations and for the remnant of Judah. Old hostilities will be gone. Ephraim (northern kingdom of Israel) and Judah will not be jealous of one another nor harass each other. People will be drawn to Christ from the four corners of the world. Thus when the Savior was nearing the time of his crucifixion he said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself.” Christ’s cross stands as the banner that draws all nations to Him.

O come, thou Branch of Jesse’s tree,

Free them from Satan’s tyranny

That trust Thy mighty pow’r to save,

And give them victory o’er the grave.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.