(90) Something Pure

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Something Pure, originally shared on February 15, 2021. It was the ninetieth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Do you long for something pure, something real, in your life? You might already have it. Today, we’re going to take a look at living through this pandemic in a way that gives our lives meaning.

   There were just under 2,000 of new cases of COVID-19 reported yesterday in LA County, and 82 deaths. Things are better but, with those kinds of numbers still being reported, they aren’t good.

   Timothy Keller, a widely respected Presbyterian pastor and author, who developed a growing church approaching mega-church status, I think, in Manhattan recently tweeted, “Both secularism and devout faith are growing. What's going away is the mushy middle of everyday religiosity.”

   I haven’t really seen the shift happening, but then we don’t get out much these days.

   If it’s true I think that things are better for the Church, but they, like the pandemic, still aren’t good.

   I would hope that church attenders in that “mushy middle” might be changed into people with “devout faith”. But I can’t say that I see it happen much after people became comfortable with a kind of cultural Christianity, a veneer that looked real but peeled away with a little pressure. Though I’m hopeful that it could happen.

   I can’t tell you how often I felt like Charly Brown trusting Lucy not to, once again, pull back the football he was charging forward to kick. For example, when I was asked to preside at a wedding for people who were not church members, but who I thought were interested in becoming a part of the community that supported the worship building and the grounds in which they wanted to be married. It rarely happened but, every time I thought, “This time it’s going to be different!”

   But if it is true, that the church is losing the “mushy middle of everyday religiosity”, does it mean that the Church is becoming something purer? Only God knows.

   I do know that mediocrity is not a Christian value. In fact, in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, which describes the return of Jesus and the last judgement in highly symbolic terms, judgement falls on various churches, including this on the church of Laodicea in Revelation 13, starting at verse 3:

*Revelation 3:14-22

   The Laodiceans were rich but believed that they could depend on themselves for the things they truly needed. Jesus urges the church to turn to him. They are the only church of the seven churches in this section of the book, about whom no good word is said.

   What do we need to be more pure? Two things. Soap and water.

   Soap makes us clean by using itself up. Every time we wash, the soap is used up. This is like the cross. Jesus died on the cross, he uses himself up to make us clean, to take away the sin that separated us from God. He made us clean so that we could be in the presence of the one true living God and that the holy God could dwell within our hearts, our true selves. We are therefore God’s saints.

   We see who Jesus is on Mt. Tabor, in the gospel reading for last Sunday, the Sunday of the Transfiguration, the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany. Mt. Tabor isn’t much of a mountain, but it stands out on the plain near Nazareth. I climbed it when I was a student on a semester abroad in college and it’s no big deal.

   Jesus is on the mountain top with three of his disciples, Peter, James and John. “And he was transfigured before them,” the Gospel reading in St. Mark 9:2-9 that was read last Sunday said. He took on some of his heavenly appearance, and Moses and Elijah appeared, and they spoke together, and his disciples start babbling in terror. Then, it got worse for the disciples. A cloud overshadows him and a voice from the cloud says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” And then, suddenly, they way no one with them any more, but only Jesus”. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus tells the three disciples not to tell anyone about this, “until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” That resurrection validated what happened on the cross. The Law and the Prophets represented by Moses and Elijah, disappear in the presence of Jesus. We are free of them. The Word of God, Jesus, reveals this to us.

   But we are still sinners. We still do the things that defy and therefore separate us from God.

   Water is the means by which the power of the cross is made manifest in our lives, a theme of these final days of the season of Epiphany.

   Water in our baptisms that, as Martin Luther describes in his Small Catechism, “brings about forgiveness of sins, redeems from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe it, as the words and promise of God declare.”

   Streams of living water that is the Holy Spirit, that shape and nourish us for the work God mission work God has given us.

   The reality of who we are as a new Creation, people who have been born again. People who are like water in the presence of Jesus Christ, the Light of the World.

               Through whom sometimes the light shines.

               From whom sometimes the light is reflected.

               And, into which our essential “shape” takes on the shape of that which contains us, the steadfast love of the one true living God.

   This is the one, true and certain thing in our lives. The love of God shown at the cross of Jesus.

   This is the nature of the one faith that unites us, that calls for no mediocre lives, but lives that are luminous with the light of God in Jesus Christ, the Light of the World.

   This is the one hope that we share, that sustains us through the vicissitudes of this current pandemic and this present age, all temporary.

   This is the water and the Word. The things that bring us into the eternal presence of the living God, who alone can make us pure, and does so in Jesus Christ.

   Pray for that, or say your gratitude to God for that, today.