Saint Paul's Lutheran Church of Irvine

Sunday, September 25th: “By What Authority?”

24Sep/110

The Greek word exousia as used at St. Matthew 21:23 when the members of the Sanhedrin challenged Jesus by asking where His authority came from means "absolute power" and "warrant." The person with this "authority" has both the right and the power to do what they do. God is our authority. Jesus the Son of God, God en-fleshed has "all authority in heaven and on earth (St. Matthew 28:18)." What He says goes! At least that's the way it's supposed to be! He permits us to disobey, but we do so only at our own peril. To resist the One with all authority is just dumb, but even worse it sets us against God and that puts our lives in jeopardy not because God is this celestial ogre waiting to pounce on someone, but because His authority does not stand by itself: it is designed to protect and bless us. So to reject it is to simply harm ourselves. When I was a little boy -- about five -- I already knew the thrust of the 4th commandment: to obey one's parents was to obey God; to disobey one's parents was to disobey God. I knew this clearly. Yet one evening dinner included sweet potatoes. For whatever reason, I had already determined at such a tender age that sweet potatoes were repulsive. The word "sweet" and "potato" just didn't go together! Both my parents -- my dear father of sacred memory -- and my dear mother ordered me to eat my sweet potatoes. I reasoned at this "innocent" age that since I did not like sweet potatoes, I had every reason in the universe to disobey. My sin had grown that much that soon! I was in fact disobeying God. Back in the day (of the Old Testament), it was easy to see why this sort of thing was so overtly evil. Parents -- God's appointed authority for the family -- stand for God's authority and this was especially seen by the severity of punishment for any child who disobeyed his parents. Deuteronomy 22:21: "Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid." Thank God that when Jesus came He kept the 4th commandment for us all and then He died to cover our breaking of it! None of us need be stoned anymore! However, how easily this reminds us of how much we take fudging on God's authority for granted. We assert our will over God's will constantly and this is why sinners -- on their own apart from grace -- simply cannot stand before God and live. Doesn't work; we reject Him too much and His rejection of such a one is simply an acknowledgement of sin-sick rebellion. So Christ came. Ironically, the Sanhedrinists questioned the authority of the One given authority to save them! That's why it is just plain silly when we commit the same sin. It's worse than shooting yourself in the foot; it's denying your entire life since Christ is the Lord of life. But we cannot deny the truth of the Gospel. Jesus came to honor God's authority! John 6:38: "For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me." And because He did, we are saved, forgiven, redeemed, put into His authority-honoring life and now that He has all authority, we who rejoice in His forgiveness are viewed by the Heavenly Father as authority-honoring children of God. This is true because Jesus honored authority for us; but it is also true that in the midst of rejoicing in our forgiveness, we are given a new life -- even as it battles with the old -- so that by God's grace we actually desire to honor God's authority.  That new desire is forged by the One with all authority which includes making new His children who confess Him and His authority! May we worship Him tomorrow and forever as a result of His authority to draw us unto Himself! In your service and to Christ's glory, Dr. Espinosa

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Sunday, September 18th, 2011: “The First Last, the Last First”

16Sep/112

Talk about crushing Law! It is this terrifying saying of our Gracious Savior to those in the visible manifestation of the kingdom of heaven on earth, the Church. Jesus is speaking to Christians in Matthew 20 when He says, "So the last will be first, and the first last." For our Savior to speak this way means that we Christians are sinners. That sounds like a simple thing to say, to think, to write, to confess, but it is totally true. Sometimes Christians just doubt this. After-all doesn't Scripture call Christians "born again," "a new creation," "children of God," "a royal priesthood," etc.? Of course God calls us these things, and that is what we are! But this does not cancel the fact that Scripture constantly employs a figure of speech called synecdoche when the whole is put for a part, or a part for the whole. We are forgiven this is true, and we are sinners who constantly confess our sin. The sinner is a saint, the saint is a sinner! We are both; we are "simultaneously justified and sinner," which is why all of us should be able to relate to St. Paul's commentaries on the battle between the two natures (Romans 7 and Galatians 5). So Christ our Lord in Matthew 20 speaks to His forgiven people, His saints, His Church and gives us an invaluable warning: our sinful nature is such that we are constantly led to gravitate towards St. Peter's insecurity expressed in Matthew 19:27: "See, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?" Even after we have received the grace of God through faith in Christ alone apart from the work's of the law, our sinful flesh starts working overtime. It leads us to play the game of comparison with others and enter into the presumption of righteousness. We know that the synergistic idea that "God has done His part, we must now do ours" is not what we confess, but it is the way we act. Our assurance of salvation begins to creep over into human security, especially as we strive to point out that we are indubitably better than others, at least a few anyway! But this is the game of the heart "deceitful above all things and desperately sick" (Jeremiah 17:9). We are to realize that our natural tendency is to claim we are first and to hold God to our way of Law. If we do, that same demand will lead us to forfeit and reject the grace of God. There is no hope for those who insist that they are first or that they should be in any way put above anyone else. The only right confession is that we are last, dead last. That we are helpless to save ourselves; that God had to go out searching for us when we were not included in the kingdom and by grace welcome us to work in His vineyard. We must confess that receiving our "denarius" is not because of our merit, but because of His grace; in fact His kind and generous gift is His grace in Christ. This situation leads us to have a new mind (even as we battle with the old); we now accept the truth: "For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself." (Galatians 6:3) AND "So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.'" What else is there to say about what we do? After all, it is only through the life, death, and resurrection of  our Savior Jesus Christ that we last ones are said to be first; not for boasting over others, but for marveling that while we are chief of sinners, God would claim us as His own! In Your Service and To Christ's Glory, Dr. Espinosa

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Sunday, September 11th, 2011: How Often?

9Sep/110

How do we begin to address what we might feel towards the terrorists responsible for the September 11th, 2001 massacre of 2,740 Americans? How were our hearts apt to join in the "joy and jubilation" (as one news source put it) when al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, was killed in Pakistan by the U.S. SEALS on May 2nd, 2011? My first reaction -- called and ordained as I am -- was gladness. Surely, if there was ever a man who got what he deserved, then this was the man! The justice of Romans 13:4 prevailed. Before President Obama gave the green light for Operation Neptune Spear, God did! But I was then struck by the spectacle of some of the dancing in the streets coming over the news. There was still a war going on, the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 was coming (and is now here), we still live in a very dangerous world, and finally, I really had to back up and check my heart. How was I really reacting towards this wicked man Osama bin Laden? Did I hate him? Had I forgiven him even in light of the God-given justice that ended his life? And what about the monstrous and cowardly hijackers themselves? Those responsible (for example) for over 3000 children losing a parent on 9/11? Was forgiveness just something I theorized about? I was called -- once again -- to repentance! When Jesus tells Peter that his optimistic "up to 7 times" isn't good enough, it appears that the more reliable translation of Christ's correction is "70 x 7 times," not as some English translations say "77 times." Either way, however, the point is that Peter was taught as we are that Christ's forgiveness (and also ours now) is limitless. But while St. Augustine may have been a little too creative in his exegesis with "77 times," he did make a good theological application at least. After pointing to St. Luke's genealogy, he says that just as the Scriptures list 77 generations from Christ all the way back to Adam, that the Lord's forgiveness is so powerful, so pervasive, and so thorough that ALL the sins of ALL generations of man are covered by the forgiveness that comes through Christ. And this forgiveness is now ours, not only in affirming our reception of it, but in living in the glow of gratitude that leads us to share Christ's forgiveness with others. Compared to the petty twenty bucks our neighbor owes us on account of his or her latest offense, the Lord has already forgiven us millions and millions and millions of dollars "worth" of our sins (sin is also treated as debt in Scripture and it is a debt we could never repay). In Christ you are debt-free so that you may finally understand the parable: you do not forgive in order to be forgiven; no, you forgive because you have been forgiven completely, forever by the blood of the Lamb. Psalm 103:12: "as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us." Hope to see you this Sunday! In Christ, Dr. Espinosa

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September 4th: Become Like Children

2Sep/110

The Holy Scriptures make it clear that Satan went after Adam in the Garden, tempted our Lord Jesus Christ in the wilderness (and had drastically different results with the Second Adam Christ!), and here in our Gospel in Matthew 18, the evil one was attacking the apostles. Luke 22:24 states the situation plainly: "A dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest." This is the embarrassing and shameful truth about sinners: all of us are concerned about our status, all of us are prideful, all of us want to be in a better position and fear being left out or lacking recognition. Selfish ambition, however, is an idol. Timothy Keller in his book Counterfeit Gods quotes Helen Rubin in the magazine Fast Company: "Of all the subjects we obsess about...success is the one we lie about the most -- that success and its cousin money will make us secure, that success and its cousin power will make us important, that success and its cousin fame will make us happy. It's time to tell the truth: Why are our generation's smartest, most talented, most successful people flirting with disaster in record numbers? People are using all their means to get money, power, and glory -- and then self-distructing." (92) Christ the Lord took a child into his arms and said to the ambitious apostles, you have to turn and become a child (Mark 9:36 & Matthew 18:3). It was like Christ was saying, "Does this little child look like he cares about running a kingdom?!" No! He is content and happy to be in my arms. What wisdom poured out from our Savior! The place to be isn't running after our false gods of success, but to be found in the arms of Christ. The only problem is that we resist God's counsel at every turn and unless our hands and feet and eyes that cause us to sin are addressed (through cutting them off and tearing them out, Matthew 18:7-9) we will remain stuck in the condemnation of sinful ambition. Jesus who is the Greatest in the kingdom of heaven (the apostles should have known the answer to their question at verse 1) took the initiative to save us while we were still enemies of God (Romans 5:10). For us, His hands and feet were "cut off" when the 5-7 inch Roman spikes went through them on the cross; for us, the Father "tore out" His eyes as He turned from the Son's perfect payment for our sins, and in Christ and in Christ alone is humility achieved, the humility which saves...but make no mistake about it, when this humility of Jesus is given to you and me (as we are incorporated into His life through Holy Baptism, the Word of Christ proclaimed, and Holy Communion), it always shows and gives a new way, a new life...we become children of God and rely on Christ for everything. By God's grace, the Holy Spirit then leads us to a humble confession that expresses the desire for the old man of ambition to die and for the new creation in Christ to remain in the arms of Jesus today and forever. See you Sunday! Pastor Espinosa

Also this Sunday: the Holy Baptism of Isabel S. Wickam. We rejoice that Isabel will receive the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit!

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