Seeing Heaven Now Open: The Mystery of Worship

Transcript (edited for readability).

God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, to enlighten the eyes of your hearts, so that you may know the riches of his glorious inheritance, together with all his holy angels. Amen.

Look. See, it's all around you — the glory of God. It's hidden, and yet it's there. It's really there, if you have eyes to see it. Not just in the whole world that God's created, the world that's charged with the glory of God, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said — the glory that shines forth like shining from shook foil, that gathers to a greatness. It was there in the chapel. And it's there in the brothers and sisters around you. The glory, if you've got eyes to see.

Now that I'm getting old, I quite often look back rather than forward, I wonder why. I look back and I think about things. I think about what I have, what God's given me, why I am the way I am, why things have turned out the way they have turned out. What do I have as a Christian? What do I have as a Christian husband? What do I have as a pastor? Let me just touch on three things.

The first. It happened when I was very young, about nine years old. It was a Christmas Eve service, a children's service, in the congregation where we were members, Neukirch Lutheran Church, Barossa Valley. You've been there, you'd know the place — a very ordinary, very old church with a very elaborate wooden altar. And on Christmas Eve there was the Christmas tree with candles. This was before electricity; the light was fairly dim, from kerosene lamps and candles. We children were standing there by the side of the sanctuary, and we were singing, "All this night my heart rejoices, as I hear, far and near, sweetest angel voices." It was then that it seemed to me that heaven was opened. I actually heard not just us singing and the congregation singing, but the angels singing together with us. As a child, I had a vision of the glory of the Lord. Interestingly, over the sanctuary we had the words "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts."

Second experience. One of the things that perplexes me is the trouble that people have with sex these days, and marriage, and everything to do with that. Now, I often wonder why I turned out the way I did sexually, because it's by no means guaranteed. Was it because my parents thumped morality into me and told me to be chaste and faithful? They did tell me that, but they didn't thump it into me. In fact, they modeled it for me. And what I received from them was a vision of the beauty of sexuality — the vision of the beauty of the relationship between a man and a woman, that mystery that mirrors the mystery of Christ and the Church. A vision, the vision of beauty. That's what's captivated me all my life about the relationship between men and women. And I'll put to you, that's what's been lost in so many parts of the Western world.

Thirdly, as a pastor — why did I become a pastor? I mean, yes, I felt that God called me. But what was it about being a pastor that gripped my imagination and drove me in this direction? I have to say, in reflection, it was that as a pastor I would be a shower — a shower forth — of the glory of God. Sure, I'd be a preacher, administer the sacraments, but by doing this I would show the glory of God to anybody who had eyes to see and ears to hear. Basically my task was to say to people, come and see, come and see what's been given to me to see.

What has driven me all my life is a vision of glory. And that's what I want to share with you. We'll be dealing with some things that may be a little bit new to you, or may be different to what you're used to hearing. So be patient with me — it's taken me a while to nail these things down, and some parts may be a little difficult. So if you have some problems, ask me to explain.

I want to talk about the vision of glory, and the connection between imagination and desire and glory. So the general topic is imagination and desire — two things that we need to reflect on much more than we have in the past. And for today, I want to speak about the vision of glory in the Divine Service — how in the Divine Service we see heaven open before us. I want to speak about the mystery of worship.

One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament is the so-called story of Jacob's Ladder, which is a bit of a misnomer. You know it well. Jacob was on the run from Esau, running away from home. He felt he'd left God behind when he left home, and there was trouble ahead of him in a foreign country. It would be not only the last he saw of his father and mother, but he feared it would be the last he'd ever see of God. And he had that strange dream, as he lay down there, of a vision of a heavenly stairway, a ramp — not a ladder, it's a stairway — that comes down from heaven. It's like those ziggurats, the Babylonian ziggurats, if you know them. And as he looked, he saw angels ascending and descending on that stairway.

Now, the angels, as you know, belong to the heavenly realm, and where there are angels, you know that heaven and earth overlap. The angels are God's courtiers; they are members of God's heavenly court. And those angels there are escorts — they escort Jacob into God's presence, and they escort God down to Jacob. So they are escorting angels. And then, at the climax of that vision, he sees — and behold, the Lord stood. The usual translation is "above the ladder," "on top of the ladder," but that's not right. He either sees God on the ladder, or near the ladder, at the bottom of the ladder, at the foot of the ladder. Now, if God is at the foot of the ladder, what does this mean? It means that God has come from heaven to earth to speak to Jacob. Just think of it — God coming down in order to speak to Jacob, and better than that, to bless him, and assure him of his presence and protection from this time on until the end of his life.

Notice the rather unexpected reversal. The normal thing is that you would imagine we need a ladder, a stairway, to heaven. There's a song about that, isn't there — "Stairway to Heaven." It's quite a good song, actually, as songs go. Now, it's back to front here. We human beings think that we need a stairway to get up to heaven. But what God gives us instead is a stairway by which he comes down to meet us where we are — in the trouble, the mess, the tragedy of our human lives. Just think of the mess that Jacob was in, and how little prospect he had of the future, how hopeless his situation was. And yet God comes down to meet him, lying there on that stone that night.

Now, this is a very important story, because it's a foundational story for the house of God, the sanctuary that was at Bethel. This is one of the foundation stories of the sanctuaries that God established in the holy land. And Bethel, as you know, was one of the very important holy places in Israel. What was special about that — Beth El means "house of God." And from this dream there was the teaching among the Israelites that here at Bethel you had the gate of heaven. Remember that Jacob's reaction at the end of the story is, "This is God's house, and I didn't know it. This is the gate of" — what? — "heaven." This is the place where, on earth, you can have access to God in heaven.

What I'd like to put to you is a question which you already know but which nevertheless needs to be put and answered: where is our Bethel? Is it there in the Holy Land, or in Jerusalem? Or is it even in that chapel, or in your church? Where is our Bethel — our gate to heaven?

Just listen to what Luther has to say in his commentary on this text. By the way, the whole of what he says about this Bethel story is worth lifting out and using over and over again — it's utterly marvelous. Luther says: wherever the Word is heard, where Baptism, the Sacrament of the Altar, and Absolution are administered, there you must determine and conclude with certainty: this is surely God's house. Here heaven has been opened. Here heaven has been opened.

Now in the New Testament, St. John picks up this story in his first chapter, which is an introduction to his whole Gospel — in the sense that it frames the way we are meant to read and hear and see what he says in this Gospel. The context is very important. After the prologue you have the testimony of John the Baptizer. There's no account of the baptism of Jesus, merely the testimony of John to Jesus — the testimony, I'll come back to that. And then there's the result of the testimony: two of his disciples, one Andrew, the other unnamed, which means it's John — this is modesty. So Andrew and John are here.

When the Baptizer sees Jesus, he points to Jesus and says, "See" — not "behold," that's outdated — "see, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." And immediately Andrew and John follow Jesus, and they want to know — and Jesus says, "What are you looking for?" And they say, "We want to see where you are staying, where you remain, where you live, where you reside." And then, after they followed Jesus and found out where he was staying, Andrew goes out and finds Peter — that's the second part of the context. And then thirdly, the next day, Jesus travels on, and he sees Philip, and he calls Philip, and Philip goes out and finds Nathanael. And the focus of the story is unexpectedly on Nathanael.

The whole context plays with the idea of seeking and finding, with testimony, but most of all with the idea of seeing and being seen. Seeing and being seen. So John the Baptizer sees Jesus coming to be baptized; he sees the Spirit descend on Jesus, and he bears witness — he sees and bears witness, and this is the finest point of all — he sees that Jesus is the Son of God. And then Jesus sees a number of people. Jesus sees Andrew and John following him, and he says, "What are you looking for?" Then later on, Jesus looks up and sees Peter, who's come to see him. And then thirdly, and most especially, he sees Nathanael. Nathanael sees Jesus, and Jesus sees Nathanael — Jesus sees Nathanael a long time before Nathanael ever sees him. And then in turn the disciples see Jesus — Andrew and John see Jesus, they see where Jesus is at home, where he resides. And above all, Nathanael sees Jesus, the Jesus who saw him first.

And the whole story ends with Jesus saying, in verse 50, to Nathanael, "You will see something greater than all these things." And here's what Jesus has to say — Jesus then replied, "Amen, amen, I tell you the truth" — notice the plural, and that's unexpected, not "you singular," Nathanael, but "you," all of you disciples — "I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven opened, and the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man."

Who is our Jacob's Ladder? Jesus. Wherever Jesus, the Son of Man, is, there you have Jacob's Ladder. There you have access to heaven here on earth. Jesus is the Son of Man — he's the representative of all humanity, the whole human race. So it's not Jesus the Son of God who is Jacob's Ladder, but Jesus the man, the incarnate Lord Jesus, Jesus in his humanity, in his fleshliness. The embodied Son of God is Jacob's Ladder. It's physical, this ladder — it doesn't float in the air. It's physical, as physical as your body and my body.

And where is this fulfilled — this promise of Jesus that you will see heaven opened, and you'll see the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man? Well, you can see it, first of all, in the baptism of Jesus, which is a Trinitarian event. God the Father sends the Holy Spirit upon Jesus, and he says to Jesus, "You're my beloved Son, I'm well pleased with you." And the baptism of Jesus culminates in the tearing apart of the temple curtain at the death of Jesus. Mark makes the very important connection between the heavens being torn open at the baptism of Jesus and the death of Jesus by using the same verb, schizo. And it doesn't stop there, because that "you" — that plural "you" — includes you, all of you. Where did you see heaven opened? Where was heaven opened before you? That's what happened at your baptism, when God the Father sent his Holy Spirit on you, and he said to you, "You're my beloved son, you're my beloved daughter, I'm well pleased with you."

Well, how do we, then — oh, I've jumped ahead. Just listen to what Luther says about an open heaven in his sermon on John chapter 1 — that's what we've been looking at. "Before the advent of Christ, heaven was closed. But in and through Christ, heaven stands ajar again. Now Christians see heaven opened. The heavenly Father still addresses these words to us: 'This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.' When you are baptized, partake of Holy Communion, receive the absolution, or listen to a sermon, heaven is open, and you hear the voice of the heavenly Father. All these gifts descend on us from the open heaven above us. Still we hear God speaking to us from heaven; we call and cry to him and he answers us." Heaven opened, God giving his gifts to us, we speaking to God, God speaking to us. The angels there with us, ushering us into the presence of God, and ushering Christ into our presence.

I'd like to speak a little bit about the mystery of the Lord Jesus — how, then, do you come to see Jesus? Not hear him, but see him. How do you come to see heaven open, and Jesus as the Son of God? One of my favorite Lutheran theologians — well, he's not really a theologian, because he's a polymath, he's everything — is a great man by the name of Georg Hamann. Far too little known, he can be a very difficult man, but he's being rediscovered at the moment, and he has a wonderful sense for everything that I'm going to cover today. He has a wonderful dictum, which is paradoxical. He says, "Speak, that I may see you." What he's getting at is that if you look at a person, you don't see them — you look at me, okay, you see my funny face, you see the bags under my eyes, you see my widening girth and wobbling gait. By looking at me you don't see me; by looking at you I don't see you. The only way that you can see a person is if they speak to you. Their words disclose them as people. Speak to me so that I may see you.

How does Jesus show himself to us? Now here's the paradox: he doesn't show himself to us through the eyes, but through the ears. And we see with our ears.

Listen to what Paul says about the disclosure of Jesus through his word, in Colossians chapter 1, verse 25. Now, those who have heard me before know that this is one of my favorite passages, but it's worth coming to again and again. Paul says, "I became its servant" — that's the servant of the church — "by the commission God gave me, to present to you the word of God in all its fullness, the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations but is now disclosed to the saints. To them God chose to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in" — or better — "among you, the hope of glory." Now, we have problems with the "in" in English, because we don't know whether it's singular or plural. This is one of the plural uses, and I'm sure Paul doesn't mean "Christ in you" primarily, but "Christ among you."

Paul here speaks of mystery, and very often we confuse mysteries with secrets. Now, I've spoken about this often, but I keep hammering it because it's an old problem. If you look at most translations of the Bible at this point, they say "the secret." Now, a secret ceases to be a secret as soon as you know it. But a mystery not only remains a mystery once you get to know it, but the more you know about it, the more you experience it, the more mysterious it becomes. Mysteries are inexhaustible, inexplicable, in the sense that you can never plumb them fully. Just think of the mystery of love — I defy any of you to tell me what love really is. Or even, from a purely human point of view, what life is — the mystery of life. Scientists can't tell you what life is. What is it that makes — not "what does it make," but what does it mean to be alive rather than dead?

So Paul here speaks about a mystery, and he says that his task, his commission, is to reveal this mystery. The word for "commission" is the Greek word for "housekeeping," the keeping of a house — he's in charge of a house, oikonomia — or it could also mean he's in charge of a temple, the house of God. So here is the keeper of God's house, and the church is God's temple, God's house. Paul sees himself as a temple keeper, as a mystagogue. Now, that's a term that was used in Greek for people who used to reside in temples and show people around temples, and explain to them the mystery of the place — explain to them the story of the gods, or the god or goddess, of that place. Paul is a temple keeper; it's his task to show us around in the house of God. And he does that by proclaiming the word of God. This mystery is hidden to outsiders, but it's revealed, disclosed, to holy people, the saints. You can't see the mystery from outside the house — you need to come into the house and live in the house to see the mystery.

So the picture I have here is Paul showing the people he preaches around God's house — he's the tour guide, and he does that by disclosing, by proclaiming the word of God fully. So whenever Paul preaches the word of God, he is showing people, he's initiating people into the house of God, he's showing them around the house of God. And the mystery that he's initiating them into is a person — it's the risen Lord Jesus, present in the congregation, in the church. Jesus, here and now, the risen Lord Jesus. And Jesus, who is present with the saints, the holy people of God, is the hope of glory. By doing so, he gives people a foretaste of the hidden riches that are to be found in Jesus — the foretaste of glory, the hope of glory, the hope that they will participate, share fully, in the glory of God when they see God face to face.

Well, how do we have access to this mystery? Well, it's through the word. This is explained more fully in two wonderful passages from the letter to the Hebrews, which I happen to be writing a commentary on at the moment, so it's very much in my mind. If there's one part of the New Testament that gives us a vision of what happens in worship, of the glory of worship, it's the writer to the Hebrews.

Now, to understand this passage you need to have — not at the back of your mind, in front of your mind — the picture of what used to happen, first of all at the tabernacle that Moses built at Mount Sinai, and then at the temple in Jerusalem. You need to see it with your imagination. Now, as you know, the tabernacle was divided into three parts. Coming from the outside, there's the outer court, where there was the altar for burnt offering. Then you had the holy place, where you had the incense altar, the lampstand, and the table for the showbread. And then you had a two-layered curtain — two curtains together, so that it formed a pathway between the two curtains that led into the Holy of Holies, where you had the throne of God, the mercy seat, with the cherubim at the sides of the throne, and at the bottom of the throne the Ark of the Covenant.

Now, what was shown by the way the tabernacle and the temple were constructed was that God only granted limited access to himself in this place. God's presence was hidden from his people in the Holy of Holies; his glory, his presence, was veiled in a cloud — remember the glory cloud? So he shows himself but conceals himself in order to reveal himself. It's hidden in that cloud — if you could go in there, all you'd see is darkness.

Now, the Israelites, the ordinary lay Israelites, had limited access to God. They had access to God at the altar for burnt offering, in the outer court. The priests had access to God in the holy place — each day, when they were on service, they'd burn incense, the way John the Baptist's father did, remember that story? The only person who had access to God, the closest access to God, was the high priest on the Day of Atonement. He was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies with very severe restrictions, and only after very, very strict preparations. His body was cleansed and consecrated by the sprinkling of blood at his consecration as priest. On the Day of Atonement he'd have to wash not just his hands and feet, as the priests normally did before they touched holy things or walked on holy ground — he had to wash his whole body. And then he came in through that double-layered curtain into this dark place. But before he actually brought the blood that he sprinkled on the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies, he would have incense on an incense bearer, and he would move it in front of him. The incense he carried produced a dark cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, so that even though there were no windows in this place, it made sure that he wouldn't see anything — there was no light.

Now, I could tell you lots of stories about this, but that's what we'll have to do for the moment. His basic qualification to come into that place was his consecration as priest, the washing of his body with water, and the blood — the blood from the sin offerings, which he brought into that place and sprinkled on the mercy seat.

Now, listen to what Hebrews has to say about your access and my access to heaven, here on earth, in the Divine Service. He says that we have access to the heavenly sanctuary, the heavenly holy places. This is what he says: "Therefore, my brothers, since we have confidence for entry into the sanctuary" — the Greek is actually "entry into the holy places" — "by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way that he inaugurated for us through the curtain, that is his flesh, the curtain of his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near, come near, with a true heart, in the full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from a bad conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water."

We have two great gifts that allow us to draw near, to come near to God — not in heaven, but heaven that has come down to earth for us. The first great gift is what is usually translated as "confidence" — we have confidence for entry into the heavenly sanctuary. Now, the Greek word for confidence is, as you know, since you are very adept at Greek, parrhesia, which means "free speech." It was used in the contemporary Greek context in which this letter was written for the right of free speech by a free person in a public assembly of a city-state — so you have a meeting of all the free citizens to make decisions, to vote, do all that kind of stuff. The slaves were not allowed to speak; only free people were allowed to speak, and only men were allowed to speak. Parrhesia is that freedom of speech, that right, that privilege of free speech. Then it's used also for frank or bold speech in public, in any public place, not just the public assembly, and also for unrestricted access to a person, usually an important person, like a king, or like Matt Harrison, or somebody like that. It then has to do with freedom, confidence, in approaching and addressing a person.

So there's a number of things connected with this word. First of all, there's the freedom of speech. Then it has to do with access to a person, approaching a person in order to speak to them. You get the basic picture — it's used in Hebrews for the privilege of access, of an audience with God. So it's the privilege of coming into God's presence in order to put your case before God, with the assurance that God won't say "get away, you don't belong here," but "yes, what do you want, what can I do for you?"

So the first thing we have is this freedom of speech, to access God the Father in heaven itself. And secondly, we have Jesus as our high priest in the heavenly sanctuary. We don't just have angels to usher us in and out — that would be good enough — but who ushers us in? Jesus himself. He is the mediator, he is the go-between. And as a result of that we can come near to God. Now, that's a very important liturgical term in Hebrews and the Septuagint. Jesus is the high priest over God's house. And this is where you get to something that almost beggars the imagination. Where's God's house? God's house is up in heaven — it's this heavenly temple. But where's God's house? It's your congregation. They're not two places — they are the same place. Can I say that again? Your congregation, assembled for the Divine Service, and God's temple in heaven, are one and the same place. And Jesus is the liturgist there — he's the high priest. You pastors don't really preside on Sunday — it's Jesus.

So we have the contrast between restricted access to God and unrestricted, open access to God in and through public worship. We have access to the heavenly places, the holy places, the heavenly sanctuary, together with Jesus. And we approach God the Father in the heavenly places through the flesh and the blood of Jesus. Now, what does that remind you of? The flesh of Jesus, which is the curtain, the way into the presence of God, and the blood of Jesus, which qualifies us to come into the presence of God — obviously an allusion to Holy Communion. At least that's the way I read it — I don't see how it makes any sense except to take it in that sense.

And what qualification do people like you and me have to come into heaven on Sundays, if I can put it as bluntly as possible? What qualification do we have? Well, our body — we have a clean conscience, a clear conscience, not a bad conscience. Our bodies have been washed with the pure water of baptism, so we can come physically into the presence of God. And our hearts have been sprinkled with the blood of Jesus, which means that we are as clean and as holy as Jesus is. So when you come to Holy Communion, and God the Father sees you there kneeling, he sees that you are as clean and as holy as Jesus, and he says to you the words that he said to Jesus: "You're my beloved son, you're my beloved daughter, I'm well pleased with you." We come near with faith — our faith is in the flesh of Jesus, our faith is in the blood of Jesus, and that gives us full assurance, the assurance of favorable reception by God the Father, in Holy Communion.

So then, we have access to glory. We have access to heaven here on earth. We have access to the very presence of God, through the Divine Service every Sunday, in the Service of Holy Communion. What could be better than that?

Now, before we can communicate an inkling of this to our people, we ourselves have to be gripped by the vision of this. Look — you can't explain it. I can't explain it. I can preach it, I can teach it, I can't make head or tail of it up here, but God's word teaches me, and I see it. I see it — not with these eyes, but with the eyes of the heart. I see it with the eyes of faith. And if I see it, then it's my task to help other people also see it. And I don't do it with my own explanations, but with the word of God.

And this is one of the key passages for this. The question is, well, okay, the mystery is revealed through the word of God — what do we see happening through the word of God in the Divine Service? It's not just as if it's up there, remote from us, so that we get a vision of heavenly goings-on. No, what we need is a vision of our involvement — how do we fit into the picture, or how does the picture fit us in?

There's one passage in Hebrews which has become dearly beloved to me, because it gives us a window into all this. It's Hebrews 12:22–25. The writer says: "But you have come near to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood for sprinkling, that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. See that you do not refuse him who is speaking from heaven."

We have here a key liturgical term in Hebrews, proserchomai, for those of you who know Greek, which means "to come near, to approach." You have it in one of your services for Holy Communion — "beloved in the Lord, let us draw near with a true heart." That's an echo of this.

Well, what is it that God wants to show you is going on in the Divine Service? Well, it's a magic number: seven. There are seven invisible things that we have access to every Sunday, with the eyes of faith.

First of all, where are you when you go to church? Where are you when you celebrate Holy Communion? Well, you are in Mount Zion — not earthly Zion, with its temple and the palace of the king, no — you are in heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly city, the place, Jerusalem, the temple, was the place where heaven and earth overlapped, in the Holy of Holies. Well, you enter in, and you stand in heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God.

And who's all around you when you come to this place? Well, there's the angels. There are myriads of angels all around you. Don't let anyone tell me that you serve in a small congregation — no, there's more than just the angels. The angels are there to assist you and me in our adoration of God, to help us in our rather inadequate singing and praising of the triune God. They are the praise leaders, not the people who play in the band.

Thirdly, you can't see them, but all around you, you have the assembly of the firstborn sons of God. Now, you know that the firstborn son in the ancient world had the right to inherit everything from the father. Now, here you get the paradox: you have thousands of firstborn sons, of both sexes, who inherit everything, who inherit everything that God has. Now, the church of the firstborn, the assembly of the firstborn, are Christians all around the world. So when you go to church there, it's not a small congregation, because not only are the angels there, but all the Christians all around the world are there with you. They're with you because together you stand in heaven itself, in the heavenly assembly.

And then you come to something that sounds rather scary — you come to the presence of God, the judge of all. But he's a judge with a difference: he's a judge who doesn't condemn sinners but justifies sinners. The God the judge who absolves from sin. Number seven — that's right at the center of this list. And then, all around you, even though you don't know it, are the spirits of the righteous made perfect — that's all the Christians who've gone before you. Your grandmother, your great-grandmother, your father, your beloved pastor, your dear friend who has died — they're all there. The saints, the holy ones who've gone before us, the spirits of the righteous made perfect, are all around us. They surround us like a cloud in this holy place.

And then you come to the center of it all, which is Jesus, who mediates a new covenant to you in Holy Communion. Holy Communion — Jesus.

Now, I would have thought the list would stop there, but comes the surprise, number seven — the most important one — the blood for sprinkling, which speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. Where is the blood for sprinkling? It's in Holy Communion. What does it sprinkle? Well, you don't just splash it on you outwardly, the way the priest did when they were consecrated — no, you drink it. You take it in, not just physically, but into your heart and into your conscience, which means that that blood cleanses you, takes away all the stain from all the sins you've committed, takes away the stain from all the abuse that you've ever suffered. It's the blood that makes you and keeps you holy through and through. The blood of Jesus, which speaks a better word than the blood of Abel, because it speaks pardon and cleansing and holiness to you.

So do you require any proof that you are forgiven, or cleansed, or holy? Well, don't look inside yourself to see how you've been sprinkled — look at the chalice, and look at Jesus, who gives you his blood. And in all of this you have Jesus speaking to you here on earth from heaven itself.

How's time going? Now, I've taken you rather quickly through that. That's a very dense passage, worth looking at and meditating on fully, and I'd advise you to use it again and again, and preach it again and again to your people. There's no better passage to lead them into the mystery of the Divine Service.

Now I'd like to end with two rather long extracts, in which Luther does the Paul thing — remember that Paul sees himself as a mystagogue, somebody who initiates people into the mystery of Christ, the mystery of glory, the mystery of the Divine Service. Now, as I read these two passages, see how Luther here not only unpacks the word of God, but appeals to the imagination and paints a picture for you to see. He doesn't want you just to understand what he says — he wants you to see what he sees.

The first passage comes from his sermons on John, John chapter 14, verse 10, where Jesus says: "The words I speak to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works." The words I speak, I don't speak on my own authority — the Father dwells in me. I'd expect him to say "speaks his word," but Jesus says the unexpected — "does his works." Now, immediately before this he said, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." See me, you see the Father. There's a great mystery here of how you see God, you see Jesus, and you see Jesus by listening to his word, and having his word come and dwell with you, and dwell in love with each other.

Now, this is what Luther has to say: "Christ did not bid you soar heavenward on your own wings, and gape to see what God is doing in heaven with the angels. No — this is his command: 'This is my beloved Son, listen to him.' There, in Jesus, there I descend to you on earth so that you can see, hear, and touch me. See and touch me. There, and nowhere else, is the place for those to encounter and find me who desire me and who would like to be delivered from their sin and be saved. If you want to see me or my work, look to Christ. If you want to hear me, hear his word" — that's the word of God the Father. So if you want to see me, look to Jesus; if you want to hear me, listen to what Jesus says. "Thus apostles and pastors were nothing but channels through which Christ leads and transmits his gospel from the Father to us. Therefore, whenever you hear the gospel properly taught, or see a person baptized, wherever you see someone administer or receive the sacrament, or wherever you witness someone absolving another, there you may say without hesitation: today I beheld God's word and work" — or rather, "God's work and word. Yes, I saw and heard God himself preaching and baptizing. To be sure, the tongue, the voice, the hands, are those of a human being, but the word and the ministry are really those of the divine majesty himself. Hence it must be viewed and believed as God's own voice resounding from heaven, and as though we were seeing him administering baptism and the sacrament with his own hands."

So what's Luther saying? Who is the one who preaches? Who is the one who baptizes? Who is the one who absolves? Who is the one who gives you Holy Communion? Not you pastors — not your pastor, but Jesus himself. That's the mystery — that Jesus is doing the doing and the saying, to speak like Norman Nagel. Now, what Luther's doing here is giving pastors and people some idea of the glory of being a pastor, but not just that — the glory of what happens in the Divine Service.

Secondly, and lastly, I'd like to read once again, at some length, Luther's remarks on the Christmas story in John chapter 1, in his sermons on John chapter 1, in connection with "you will see heaven opened, and the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man." That's his basic text, and in connection with that he has a long, long passage — it just goes on and on. He wants to reinforce it this way and that way, just to get people to see what he's trying to say. But this is what he says:

"Before Christ's incarnation, heaven was closed indeed. But now the Christ child was born, and the angels preached their nocturnal sermon about the child to the shepherds outside the town of Bethlehem. From that time on, heaven is now opened, and now we too have citizenship among the angels, as St. Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:19. There we find the true city and true Jerusalem, where we are citizens and members of the same household as the angels, fellow countrymen of those who live and have their being in heaven. The angels look down upon us, and we in turn gaze up to them. Christ wants to say, you are now celestial citizens, you hold citizenship up here. I am not up there in heavenly Jerusalem — you are living in the company of the dear angels, who incessantly descend on you and ascend on you." Do you hear that? Descend and ascend on you — I want to come back to that, tell you a little story.

"Now heaven and earth have become one. It's just as if the angels were serving you, for you are one body with your Lord. The angels wait on you, they converse with you, and you with them, employing the same words and speech. They sing 'Glory in excelsis Deo' to our God, and you also sing the praise, that you become God's children and heirs, co-heirs with his dear Son, partakers of the Holy Spirit and of all gifts. Surely this does not indicate a closed heaven, but it implies that the door and the lock have been removed, and that heaven is now open permanently. Even if you don't see this, even if I don't see this with my physical eye, as a cow looks at a door, that does not matter — I can behold it with my spiritual sight of faith. I behold it with the eyes of faith."

Now, you see here what Luther does — the angels ascended and descended on what? The ladder, Jacob's Ladder. And the angels ascend and descend on Jesus. But now Luther says, in the Divine Service, the angels descend and ascend on you. Why do they do that? Well, because God knows how hesitant we are to come into his presence, so we need the best possible escorts. So he sends angels to bring us to the Lord's table, and he sends angels to escort us out into the world we live in. We don't preach and teach enough on the angels — I would contend that with all of you. You see how Luther here focuses on our companionship with the angels, and how it connects with the Divine Service.

Let me just tell one story, and then there'll be a couple of minutes for questions. Over the last few years I've been working with a woman who's been rather badly abused, sexually and in other ways. Now, for her, the only thing that's helped her — not just spiritually, but also psychologically and physically — is Holy Communion, coming to the Lord's table and drinking the blood that makes her clean and holy. Now, what the devil always does is get on her back and say, "You shouldn't go to Holy Communion, you can't go to Holy Communion, you're unclean, you're unworthy, you're useless, you're damned, you're no good, and if you come to Holy Communion you'll die." So what God has given her again and again is a vision of two angels. To do what? To escort her to the Lord's table — not only there, but also away, because sometimes the journey back is as hard as the journey forward. She has her own personal two angels — not one guardian angel, but two escorts to bring her to the Lord's table.

Thank you.