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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +

Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

After more than one week away, I am glad to be back in East Texas; though, to be sure, my friend and I did have a great time skiing in Colorado. I thank you for the opportunity to go on vacation, and I thank The Rev. Dr. Roy Southard for teaching Bible Class, conducting the liturgy, and preaching in my absence. The Epiphany season begun before I left continued last week and continues this week. Although, last week the appointed Gospel Readings themselves took a “vacation” of a sort from St. Mark’s account, as we heard St. John tell of Jesus’s initial conversations with disciples such as Andrew and Nathanael. Today, we are back with St. Mark, picking up right after Jesus’s forty-day temptation in the wilderness, which we will hear about the first Sunday in Lent. Today, the Third Sunday after Epiphany, we hear about Jesus’s beginning His ministry after John the Baptizer was arrested. By Divine inspiration, St. Mark writes that Jesus “came into Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel.” St. Mark alone records Jesus’s saying “The time is fulfilled”, and St. Mark alone pairs Jesus’s call to “repent” with His call to “believe”, and so we consider the Gospel Reading’s opening two verses under the theme, “Time to Repent and Believe”.

John the Baptizer had preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, so Jesus’s preaching of repentance was similar. John had preached that a greater One was coming, so Jesus’s preaching of a Kingdom at hand was also different. John’s prophecy is fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus ushers in a new era, fulfilling not just John’s prophecy about Jesus but also other prophecy, such as Daniel’s Old Testament prophecy about the time coming when saints would possess the Kingdom. Those who knew their Old Testament and were paying attention could hardly miss the significance of Jesus’s proclaiming, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Truly, then was, as now is, the “Time to Repent and Believe”.

You and I are constantly confronted by time, are we not? My friend and I last week marked our limited number of days skiing together in a variety of ways, including daily devotions. We could mark the time, but we could hardly stop it or even slow it down; as the saying goes, time marches on. Email and tweets to smart phones instantly confront us wherever we are and whatever we are doing. Deadlines at school or work may even drive us to spend time to learn how to better manage our time. An urgency of time is present in all three of our appointed readings for this day, and the concept of time has an interesting background, both inside and outside the Bible. Time brings decisive moments that demand decisive action. Each moment is in some sense a time of judgment—a time that we need to recognize brings a demand which we need to act on in order to fulfill. Do we prove faithful or not? Do we resist temptation or not? Coveting other people? Having discontent over our possessions? Giving false testimony? Taking our neighbor’s possessions? Being sexually indecent? Hurting or harming our neighbor? Disobeying or provoking our parents or other authorities? Despising the preaching of God’s Word? Misusing God’s Name? Placing something or someone else above God? In the individual moments of each and every day, how often do we sin by what we do or do not say, think, or do?

The city of Jerusalem in Jesus’s day failed to recognize the time of its visitation, and, as a result, the city was soon destroyed. Each moment of every day brings us closer to the consequences of our final judgment, either at the end of our individual earthly lives or at our Lord’s return, whichever comes first. As St. Paul expounds Isaiah for the Corinthians, “Now is the favorable time, now is the day of salvation.” For, as Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand.” If you are presently an unbeliever for whom each and every sin damns to hell, whether we are believers who have sinned in some heinous ways that have driven the Holy Spirit from us, or whether we are believers who are simply steeped in sins thought to be more-easily forgiven, Jesus tells us how we can enter the Kingdom of God: “Repent and believe in the Gospel”. Uniquely in St. Mark’s account, Jesus explicitly gives what are usually understood as the two parts of “repentance” in a broader sense: first, contrition, “repenting” in a narrower sense of being sorry for one’s sin and, second, faith, believing that God the Father forgives one’s sin. When we repent of our sin and believe that God forgives our sin, God the Father truly forgives our sin, whatever our sin might be. He forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake.

Jesus is Himself the Gospel of God that He proclaimed, the “good news” that God authors, makes possible, and uses to offer salvation to all of fallen and sinful humankind. As St. Paul writes to the Galatians, when the fullness of time had come, God the Father sent forth His Son Jesus, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem us who were under the law, so that we might receive the adoption as sons. One time a scribe, who overheard Jesus disputing some Sadducees, himself questioned Jesus. The scribe ultimately affirmed Jesus’s answers, understanding God’s Old Testament revelation, but the scribe failed to confess Jesus as the Savior. Jesus told that Scribe that he was “not far from the Kingdom of God”, but to be just outside is still to be outside. Jesus brings the Kingdom to us by grace through faith in Him. Jesus was born for us, lived the perfect life we fail to live, died on the cross for our sins, and rose from the dead that we might have new life in Him. As we confess in the Small Catechism’s explanation of the Lord’s Prayer, “The Kingdom of God comes … unto us … [w]hen our Heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that by His grace we believe His holy Word and lead a godly life, here in time and hereafter in eternity.” And, that Word we are to believe is not far away.

Some of you may, as I do, know and like some of the lyrics and music by contemporary Christian songwriter Michael Card. One of his collections, titled “The Ancient Faith”, is based largely on passages from the Old Testament, and it includes a song titled “The word is so near”. Of the nearness of the word, Michael Card writes:

No, the Word we are to believe is “so near”; it is before us, for our Lord has sent it by way of preachers of repentance and faith—preachers of repentance and faith like Jonah in our Old Testament Reading, St. Paul in our Epistle Reading, and Jesus Himself in our Gospel Reading. But, the preaching of repentance and faith did not stop with Jesus. Rather, in the Gospel Reading Jesus also called Simon and Andrew and James and John, and Jesus still calls pastors today—to preach this Word to you, to baptize you with water and the Word, to forgive your sins by words of individual absolution, and to speak His words over bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, through which He feeds you His body and gives you to drink His blood, for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Through our Lord’s Word in all its forms, He brings us His Kingdom—making us His children once in Baptism and repeatedly forgiving us through Absolution and the Supper until our time in this world is fulfilled.

You might have noticed or otherwise remember that the Small Catechism’s explanation to the Lord’s Prayer that I quoted a moment ago calls for us to “lead a godly life, here in time and hereafter in eternity”. “Here in time” we who believe continue to be, at the same time, justified and sinful. That we continue to be sinful means we will continue to struggle against temptation, without vacation. We will continue to struggle against temptation, and, in that struggle, we will often fail. For that reason, when Jesus tells us that it is “Time to Repent and Believe”, Jesus uses Greek words in forms that mean “keep on” or “continue” repenting and believing, repent and believe “repeatedly”. We live our whole lives in daily contrition and repentance, for faith lives in such repentance. As we repent and believe, we remain in Him, in Whom alone the demands of each and every moment here in time are met and in Whom alone we have hope for hereafter in eternity. We may be tempted to, but we do not lose that hope.

Oswald Allen lived in England and Scotland during the 19^th century. From his boyhood, he suffered from a diseased spine, but his health did not keep him from being educated and eventually taking a job at his father’s bank, where even succeeded his father as bank manager and was well-known for deeds of good will and mercy. Confined to his home during the particularly severe winter of 18-59, Allen wrote some 148 hymns of the Christian life, many of a soft, tender, and comforting type. In prefacing their later publication, Allen said that he had felt and witnessed hymns’ soothing and elevating effects on his own heart and that he hoped that his hymns would comfort and console others. Surely they have done so and continue to do so. We close by affirming in prayer Allen’s words about our sure and certain hope in the final stanza of our opening hymn:

Amen.

The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +