5th Sunday in Lent
Texts: John 12:1-8;
Isa 43:16-21; Phil 3:4b-14
YouTube: https://youtu.be/z19GmHI0NZo
Sermon Notes
THE URGENCY OF DOING ‘GOD’S NEW THING’ —
NO LONGER THE OLD THING OF NATIONALISTIC CIVILIZATIONS
As you have heard by now, something very new has happened in my life — something that has already happened for many of you here today. I am a grandpa for the first time. Tiny xxxxxxxx Nuechterlein was born into this world on Friday. Yea! I anticipate crying tears of joy the first time I get to hold him. My heart is full of joy and love!
Full disclosure: I’m also frightened — frightened for the world he is to grow up in. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so important for me to preach the Gospel in a way that encourages us all to make this world a better and safer place for all of our children.
Our First Reading from Isaiah 43 talks about God doing a new thing. Forget the old. Prepare the way for God’s new thing. We can hear these words as individuals when something new is happening to us — like a new grandchild! But generally the prophets are talking to the nation as a whole. In fact, this is how I’ve come to hear these prophecies about God offering us “new creation.” God is saying to us, in effect: “For more than four millennia now, your nationalistic and imperialistic ways of doing civilization have been unsustainable. They are based on being over against others . . . yielding constant warfare and bloodshed. Your brand of societies have been violent and oppressive because they favor a small portion of the society ruling over the majority. They have been based on ‘divide and conquer.’ For more than four thousand years now, nations and empires have risen and fallen because they have relied on a failed way of doing civilization.”
So at various times in the history of God’s people, God through the prophets have told us, “I’m offering you a new way of doing things that leads to life — a New Creation, if you will. Armies and warriors are extinguished like a wick; swords are beaten into plowshares.”
It’s important for us for a few moments to rehearse the many times God is proclaiming a new thing, a new creation. In this past year we’ve read from St. Paul that in the cross of Jesus God is creating one new humanity in place of all the ways in which we divide ourselves, thus making peace (Eph 2:15). Last week, our reading from St. Paul said that all who are in Christ Jesus are already a New Creation. And what does that mean? That God is reconciling all things in Christ and calling you and I to a ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:17-20) — of bringing together what has been so divided.
Looking ahead briefly to Easter season: on Easter Sunday itself, we will read about God creating a new heavens and a new earth from the prophet Isaiah (Isa 65:17). And then in the last three weeks of the Easter Season we will read again about a new heavens and a new earth, with the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to earth (Rev 21-22) — all of that after the Book of Revelation narrates about fifteen chapters of what the history of failed human civilizations looks like. We know this, don’t we? After four thousand years of nations falling and rising, we know this! And God is offering us something new.
My friend Brian McLaren puts it this way (once again from his recent book Life after Doom):This is the very basic shape of the biblical message taken as a whole. God though the prophets brings judgement — in other words, shows us the failed state of our human attempts at civilization, in nationalistic and imperialistic mode. That’s the bad news. But there’s good news, too. Spaced out through the Bible, in many times and places (like I’ve just rehearsed for you), God offers us a new way to successfully do civilization, a New Creation, if you will. Where we are one new humanity in place of all our dividedness (Eph 2:15).
But a key to our actually grasping and accepting these offers is to see things with indigenous wisdom. At the moment the church is born, Jesus’s people, the Jews, have been indigenous people in someone else’s empire for centuries. Maybe they’re more open to seeing what a failure this has been. Jesus, the Messiah, is himself an indigenous man. Siblings in Christ, this is one of those times when that new way of doing civilization from God is being offered. A key will be to listen to indigenous friends for their wisdom in understanding the biblical journey, seeing things from the perspective of people who have been oppressed by our failed civilizations. We might then be able to begin to see what New Creation is about. It will mean listening to the perspectives of Black Lives Matter in order to hear and see how our way of doing civilization is failing again. Or listening to our scientific community on climate change. God is about to do something new. Forget the old ways. Will we accept it this time for the sake of our children and grandchildren?
I have been preaching against Christian Nationalism in my year with you because it reads the Bible in the opposite way as what I quoted from Brian McLaren. Christian Nationalism seems to be saying, if we watch their actions:
Whatever shortsighted and small-hearted civilization currently dominates our world, well, we want us some more of that. We want to double-down on that. Bring on the billionaire despots to rule over us — people like Vladimir Putin and his admirers and imitators. We want that.
Why? Because we believe God is going to end the space-time universe in order to end the wickedness of things like what the “global elites” seem to want — things like gay rights, Black Lives Matter, and, of course, the chief of all evils, socialism.
Why do we want to double-down on the unsustainable way of doing civilization that has plagued human history for more than four millennia? Because we believe God is going to rapture away us good and faithful people who believe in Jesus — maybe real soon. Whatever happens to this world, we’re going to heaven, anyway, leaving all the wickedness behind us.
I say it this somewhat exaggerated way because I think it’s broadly true, especially the current version of Christian Nationalism. But I don’t say it to introduce hopeless division between ourselves and fellow Christians. No, in fact, the first step to accepting the new thing which God is doing is to be honest with ourselves that most Christians have accepted a version of this ‘flipped biblical script’ for well over a thousand years. The church has for a long time come to read the Bible to focus more on the fate of individuals, because we’ve largely partnered with the failed nationalistic and imperialistic attempts at doing human civilization. Oh, we didn’t see them as failed attempts. That’s been the problem. We somehow believed that if we could infuse the past four millennia of nations and empires with a bit of Christian love, we could make them OK, sustainable. We thought we could baptize them somehow into being something acceptable to God’s way of doing things. Again, if we listen to indigenous wisdom and movements like Black Lives Matter — if we listen to the science community on climate change — we will see how wrong we we’ve been.
But making the choice for God’s new creation, for God’s way of doing civilization, will seem like a death. The current version of Christian Nationalism is, even now, leading to higher death tolls in places like Africa, where the sudden loss of USAID is leading directly to greater starvation. Paul describes it in our Second Reading today. He says, ‘I was an upstanding leader of my community, the best way of doing things as a Pharisee. And I had to count that all as loss, as garbage.’ (If you look in a Greek lexicon, it says that the word Paul uses for “garbage” is actually ‘a crass word for feces.’2 So Paul is actually saying he had to count his former life as ‘crap,’ or the sh– word.) That’s how strongly Paul is stating the matter. He’s saying, ‘I looked back on my life as an upstanding citizen and count that as failed. I ended up persecuting Christians. I need to choose a new way. I need to die and rise with Christ.’ That’s what this season is about. The best of civilizations, his own Jewish civilization, is crap compared to the new thing God is doing in Jesus Christ.
Our failed way of doing civilization always leads to higher death tolls as a direct consequence of our actions. That’s the biggest problem. And that we might have a better chance of seeing this, God sent the Messiah Jesus into our world, knowing that he would inevitably have to endure the kind of death we typically deal out.
That’s what this season is about. That’s at the heart of the Holy Week we are leading up to next week. Jesus dying for our sins. Not just in the sense that as individuals we can now be saved for heaven. Yes, that included in the bigger package. God’s more gracious with the gift of life than we can ever imagine, anyways, especially when we’re in the stinkin’ thinkin’ of nationalism. No, Jesus dies for our sins in the sense of dying at the hands of our sin, so that we can see how wrong we’ve been, even at the moment we are being forgiven for it. Forgiven for wrong we have been. Jesus dies a victim of our failed way of doing civilization so that we might finally choose the new thing God is doing. We might finally choose to die and rise with the Messiah in order that we finally leave our failures behind for God’s way of doing civilization. Which leads to life! Now!
We are at the moment in our liturgical season when we make Mary’s choice of anointing Jesus for burial, so that we might graciously be ready for resurrection with him. That we might be ready to fully and completely say “Yes!” to New Creation, to a new way of doing things. Again, for the sake of our children and grandchildren. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, April 6, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/z19GmHI0NZo
Sermon Notes
Notes
1. Brian McLaren, Life after Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024), 110.
2. Friedrich Lang, TDNT, Vol. 7, 445-447, on the Greek word σκύβαλον (skubalon). He translates Paul’s use in Phil 3:8 as, “I count them all as dung.” He further says, “The choice of the vulgar term stresses the force and totality of this renunciation.” See also the paragraph on skubalon in the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker (BAGD) lexicon, 758.
