The text for this morning is from Paul’s letter to the Church at Ephesus, the first chapter:
In Christ we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.Thus far the text.
Dear friends in Christ,
Objectively, at the beginning of today’s Gospel narrative in Mark 6, things seemed to be going well for John the Baptizer. He is preaching repentance and the forgiveness of sins. He has baptized the Lord of all Creation in the person of Jesus Christ. He is drawing crowds from far and near, returning the hearts of sons to their fathers and daughters to their mothers. He is able to put down the rhetoric of the Pharisees without any theological training, because as a prophet of God, the Holy Spirit is giving him the words to speak, the ears to hear, the mind to think, the ability to say his good words. He is living out his vocation well. He is even obeying the vow that he has made to his God, that he would not cut his hair, that he would drink no alcohol, that he would touch no dead thing.
But the problem is, the Naziritic vow John the Baptizer is under, it will always come to an end. A vow to obey is always broken; it will always be broken. Even you, you will always disobey your vows. The wages of sin, the wages of breaking vows, is death. And you, like John the Baptizer, will die. John the Baptizer, at the end of the Gospel lesson, did die. He died with his head unceremoniously being lopped off, a sword coming down right on his neck, head bouncing to the ground, and being served up on a silver platter to the evil queen, Herodias, because of her daughter, Salome, and a stupid promise made by a drunken and lecherous King Herod.
John the Baptizer died because he did what was asked, what was required of him. John lost his head. Quite literally. John died because he was doing his vocation, he was preaching repentance and the forgiveness of sins. That was his vocation.
But, that’s not a bad thing, is it, that he died? Oh, we like to think so, don’t we? When someone passes, it’s always, oh, how awful. Oh, how sad. Oh, well, they weren’t having a very good quality of life anyway. It’s never, YES! It’s never, THEY WON THE VICTORY! It’s never, Praise God!
We so often don’t treat death like it’s awesome. And I guess its not. After all, it is the wages of sin. Death was never intended for us. We were meant to live forever. But, when a person is in Christ Jesus, death leads us to the best thing ever! I know, yes, I know, that it is difficult to lose someone in this life. It’s got to be the hardest thing anybody on this side of eternity ever goes through. However, the loss of that person is only for a short time when we are in Christ Jesus. It is only for a little while. Because that person leaves this life and flies to be with Christ. It’s like the Brad Paisley song, Waiting on a Woman, all over but in reverse. In his song, it’s always a man waiting on a woman: to get her makeup done, to quit shopping, to get married, and when he gets to heaven, he’ll be waiting for his wife to get up there, ‘cause man she takes her own sweet time.
I gotta tell you, the people up in heaven aren’t waiting for us. We’re waiting for them! Come on back! Join us! Be resurrected! Come into the life planned for you from the beginning of time itself! We wait down here for the consummation of all creation. We wait down here for Jesus Christ to come back, to make a new heavens and a new earth, for us to find our lives fully in Him. We may die waiting, but Christ will return and recreate all things, including us.
But for now, while we wait, while we continue in this sinful world, the sinful world that crucified its Lord, we live life in the guillotine, just like John. We live in a world that can take our lives, just for whatever reason it wants to.
You’re driving down the freeway in LA, on your way to pick up your kids, and all of the sudden Justin Bieber or Lindsay Lohan, plow into you at a hundred miles an hour. Not the way to meet a celebrity, but all too common.
Or maybe you’re like a friend of my father’s, who died when he was working in the fields of his father, getting chopped up in the combine.
Or maybe you’re like the reformer before the reformation, John Hus, who was burned alive at the stake for preaching the true doctrine of the Gospel that the Roman Catholic church didn’t like.
Or maybe you’re like some of our members, who are going through their lives and they get cancer, or a blood disease, or an infection, or a broken bone, and they die slowly and painfully.
Or maybe… maybe you’ll just have your own way of dying.
What do all of these people who die have in common? They are doing their work, they are living out their lives in their vocation and their lives are taken from them. A father picking up his children, a son performing chores for his parents, a man preaching the Gospel, a wife who gets a disease, a church member who just can’t get healthy. These are intrusions on our vocations. But despite the intrusions that happen, despite that we know they are likely to come, we live our lives here on this earth, and we live them to the best of our ability, and why? Because God has called us to them. God has called us to vocation.
He has given us the gift of life, not for our own selfish desires, but because He desires us to take care of others. We don’t need the works that we do. We don’t need to make ourselves healthier for our benefit, we make ourselves healthier so we can be around to raise our children. We don’t need a house to keep ourselves warm for our benefit, we need a house to shelter our families. We don’t plow the fields for food for us and for our benefit, we plow because there are people around us, even those who will buy it, who need to eat. We don’t get married because we just want someone to wait on us hand and foot, for our benefit, we get married so someone can help us accomplish our vocations, to make a good home, to show the Gospel in forgiveness to each other, to have children, to raise children, to bring people up in the fear of the Lord. We don’t do our work for our benefit, because to do so is tantamount to saying, “I’m going to work out my salvation for me.” You don’t need your good works, your neighbor needs them. You have all the good works you need and more in Christ Jesus through His life, death, and resurrection.
Where do we find this? In the Epistle Lesson today, we see that in Christ we have obtained an inheritance. Yes, this means that we will, in Christ, find ourselves in Him, we will find ourselves in the new heaven, in the new earth. We will be with Him forever, because He has promised this and sealed this promise of forgiveness of sins and of life everlasting by raising Himself up from the grave on the third day.
But we also have an inheritance now. We are sons and daughters of the King of all creation! He has adopted us through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ! And as sons and daughters of the King, and even though we do it imperfectly, we have duties and responsibilities here and now.
There never was a good prince who didn’t ride through his Father’s lands and take an accounting of the actions there. There never was a good princess who didn’t submit to her Father’s will and play the lady of the castle with eloquence and elegance. There never was a prince or princess who didn’t have duties, different duties from each other to be sure, but duties nonetheless.
And so, too, do you. Sons and daughters of the King, what is your vocation? Father? Mother? Son? Daughter? Husband? Wife? Parishioner? Leader? Follower? Giver? Receiver? Friend? Neighbor? Pastor? Musician? Theologian? These are all different types of vocations, and is, by no means, an exhaustive list, with different duties and different roles.
Whatever it is that your vocation is, and you will have many and varied vocations through your life, even at the same time, we have the promised inheritance that 1) this is indeed our work for this life, 2) that our work will be difficult and sin-filled, 3) that we will find forgiveness in Christ Jesus for failing to do our vocations perfectly, and 4) that we will find everlasting life in Christ Jesus and will be with Him forever.
This has always been the plan. Paul knew this when he wrote to the Ephesians. Jesus knew this when He preached to the crowds. John the Baptizer knew this when he laid his head on the chopping block. Amos knew this when he was tending the flocks and dressing the figs. Isaiah knew this when he called for fathers to teach their children of God’s faithfulness. David knew this when he refused to take the life of his king, King Saul. Abraham knew this when he was promised to be the father of many nations. Adam knew this before the fall when he was called to steward the Garden of Eden and take care of his wife, Eve. Vocation is inherent in us as human beings, even sinful human beings. What is your vocation? And what is its purpose?
The only purpose of vocation, just as the only purpose John the Baptizer truly had, is to show the world that the Messiah has come, it is to display Christ, specifically in repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Vocation truly is to complete all things in accordance with the will of God, to do what He has put in front of us to do, to repent of our sins and our failures, to receive forgiveness for all of our sins and our failures in the name of Jesus Christ, and to be the praise of God’s own glory. We are to be the praise of God’s glory. When we die, when we receive our full inheritance, it will be said of us in the heavens because of our time here on earth, “Well, done, thou good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a very little; I will set you over much. Enter now into the joy of your Master.”
And how will we hear this great and wonderful thing? Not by our own work, no. We don’t work for ourselves. And even if we could, we do it imperfectly and badly each time. We work rather for our neighbor, the recipient of our vocation, and our work is perfected in Christ Jesus because He is our righteousness and we are washed in His blood. Paul makes this clear in our text for today. We hear this wonderful thing, we do our wonderful work on this earth, we are brought to wonderful repentance, we receive wonderful forgiveness, because we are sealed in the promise of the Holy Spirit. Where were we sealed?
We are sealed in the promise of the Holy Spirit, the only way the Scriptures say: in our baptisms, my friends, where we are washed in the cleansing waters with the very Word of God. We are literally raised from the dead in our baptisms. We were once dry bones and now we have flesh and blood and Spirit. We are God’s own. We are His workmanship, created for good works in Christ Jesus.
And now again we grow, we persevere, we hold fast, we are refreshed, we keep running the race, we live out our vocations then, being strengthened and kept in the one true faith, in faith toward God and in fervent love toward one another in the Lord’s Supper. Yes, even being baptized, even eating the Lord’s flesh, even drinking the Lord’s blood, even giving prayer, praise, and worship to God, these are vocations that we are to fill.
We live in this promise, this gift. We do our vocations. We work hard. And we are continually growing through the very Word of God, the same Word of God that we had inscribed on our hearts and in our minds in our baptisms and that we hear, eat, and drink in communion. This is why we continue to come here, to this church, to be surrounded in the Word all the time. We are called to it. We are commissioned into it. We are given the gift of God’s grace in these ways, again, the only ways Christ instituted in order for us to receive Him, His very Word, His very body, His very blood, and His very hand washing us clean, while we wait for our full inheritance to draw nigh.
So, John, living under the threat of death, living life in the guillotine, so to speak, living in such a way that he would preach the Word of God, the call to repentance and the forgiveness of sins, which is the vocation that ALL of us have to one another, did John fail? Since he died, did John the Baptizer fail at his vocation? In that he was a sinner, yes, of course. But, living as a redeemed and baptized son of God in Jesus Christ, no, no of course not. John, living under the guillotine, living under the threat of the sword, he didn’t fail. He realized that his life, compared to the life he has in Christ Jesus, it was only the promise of something more, and that something more is something eternal, something very good.
John lived under the threat of death at any time, as do we all, as we always will. We will never escape it until we die in this life or Jesus comes back to resurrect us, to make our bodies and lives whole, and to redeem all of creation, and for Jesus to say to us, “See? I promised you this was going to happen. I promised you that you’d live again. In Me, you did well. Your faith has made you free. Your faith in Me has raised you from the dead, keeping you safe and secure until now. Well, done, thou good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a very little in this life; I will now set you over much in the next. Enter now into the joy of your Master, into the joy of me, into the joy Christ.” All this, my friends, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Now may the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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