We are aware of the high cost of living. We are not so nearly aware of the high cost of loving. “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son...” This is the story of the incarnation – from the manger birth to the cross on Calvary’s hill. This is the ultimate example of love, and it is the pattern and model of the kind of love that we are encouraged to show in response to God’s love for us.

There are not any of us who can fathom the price of true love as it is demonstrated by Jesus’ crucifixion and all that it means to us in respect to our relationship to God. “But we see Jesus,” said the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, “who for a little while was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:9). And we see in Jesus the kind of love we are to extend to the human family about us. “This is My commandment,” said Jesus, “that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).

It is going to cost something to love – the addicted and the perverted, the selfish and the corrupted, those of classes and races other than our own, even our neighbors down the block or some of the people we worship with in our own churches. Our great God who gave us God’s love will now extend that love to others – through us.

Despite our enthusiastic affirmation and proclamations of God’s love for humankind, there are people we do not like very much. We pray God’s forgiveness and ask God to teach us anew the meaning of Jesus’ great love and thereby enable us to love and accept others even as God loves and accepts us.

And making a whip of cords, He drove them all...out of the temple. John 2:15

It is difficult to conceive of Jesus as ever being angry. Perhaps this is because we foolishly assume that there is no room for anger in love or in loving relationships. We can more easily accept anger in a person such as St. Paul, who told his constituents at Ephesus to “be angry but do not sin” [Ephesians 4:26]; and yet the degree of anger demonstrated by Jesus within the circumstance of our Gospel lesson may disturb us at times.

Both the humanity and the divinity of the loving Jesus may well have been indicated in the temple incident. We may sincerely question what might be the reaction of Jesus to some of the “temples” we have erected to the glory of God – the Jesus whose concern for the poorest of the poor is far above any multimillion-dollar sanctuary that His more affluent children may raise up and support in His name.

There is time for anger. We ought to be angry about anything that comes between a person and God, about people’s misguided focus upon places in which to worship rather than persons to serve, about questionable activities in God’s house, about poverty and injustice and war, about the self-centeredness of most of us who put our personal comfort and welfare above the dire needs of millions of God’s human creatures that inhabit our planet.

There are times when it may be sinful not to be angry in our kind of world. We need to be aware, however, that God-pleasing anger results in the kind of actions that heal those who hurt, support those who suffer, and bring God’s love to bear upon those who are estranged from God.

Temptation – it often takes the shape of food and drink that promises to satisfy our hunger and slake our thirst. It promises fulfillment and happiness – poking into the dark hours with beckoning fingers of hope, interrupting the drudge-laden routine with moments of tantalizing excitement, relieving the pain with experiences of pleasure and delight.

Temptation never lets up. We may have sometimes envied Jesus who had angels to help Him after His forty-day ordeal in the wilderness. Do we wonder if it’s fair that we, composed of such human stuff, should be so constantly exposed to that which so very often cannot be humanly resisted.

We are exposed to temptation – and we discover very realistically that we cannot win all of the temptations. It is said that temptation is necessary to Christian maturity. It can be used by God to develop our dependence on God. It ought to result in keeping us close to God. We are supposed to grow stronger in the heat of conflict and even to discover that our weaknesses can become channels of divine power and sustenance.

God doesn’t send temptation, but God obviously allows it. And with every temptation God promises the grace to resist it. We must learn how to hold on to that grace. God grants us the grace and love to be faithful to God and God’s will for our lives.

We can only guess why just three of the disciples accompanied Jesus up the mountain on this significant day. Perhaps it was because these three would be especially responsible for continuing the ministry of Christ after He left them. James would need the recollection of the experience to cool his intolerant spirit temper his ambition, comfort him in Gethsemane, and strengthen his faith as he laid his head on Herod’s block. It was probably in part, this mountaintop vision that kept John from fleeing in haste at Jesus’ betrayal and crucifixion and enabled him to endure his exile to Patmos. Peter would often need the memory of that vision to strengthen his wavering courage and enable him to stand against persecution, comfort other believers amidst their trials, and testify to millions throughout history that he was an eyewitness of Christ’s majesty and heard with his own ears the voice borne from heaven, “This is My beloved Son; listen to Him.”

It is not surprising that these men, particularly Peter, wanted to settle down with Jesus on that mountaintop for the rest of their lives. It was not meant to be. It was back to the valley for them – to those places between a rock and a hard place where they were to continue, enriched and renewed by what they had just witnessed, to lovingly and faithfully serve in the difficult arenas of this world. The transfiguration was a necessary experience for them, but it was not the grand finale. It was designed to equip them for service in the new kingdom, to better enable them to face and overcome the hardships and sufferings involved in witnessing concerning the Kingdom of God.

Oh, that we could have been there on the mountain! Don’t we, too, seek out-of-this-world experiences to give wings to our flagging spirits? Perhaps we do. But only if we will also fully recognize the cross-bearing that goes with it.

Our Gospel Lesson from Mark 1:29-39 is a graphic picture of the desperate need of people – and of that One who is able to apply healing and fulfillment for those needs. What we continuously need to review and remember is that this same Jesus also applies His divine touch to the ailments of suffering people today. He knows all about the “demons” that afflict us - whether they take the form of some bad habit or weakness, or show themselves in some compulsion to hate or covet or lust or worry or fear. Jesus knows, and stands ready to cleanse and cure. We trust Him to do just that.

One key to Jesus’ power and ability is suggested in the practice of Jesus, who early in the predawn hours of the day, “rose and went out to a lonely place, and there He prayed.” He was constantly in touch with God the Father.

We can find the power, an inner joy and peace, the spiritual health that will keep us strong and motivated through the blue Mondays, the difficult Tuesdays, the unhappy Wednesdays of our lives! And we can learn to channel such power and peace and joy to the difficult people and situations all about us. It means keeping in touch with God and allowing God to keep in touch with us through Word and Sacrament, the means of grace, and daily communion through prayer and praise. God will have God’s way with us and through us.

Did you know the longest word in English has 189,819 letters and takes three and a half hours to pronounce – correctly. Seriously! It’s the chemical name of Titin (or connectin), a giant protein “that functions as a molecular spring which is responsible for the passive elasticity of muscle.”

The three longest words in The Oxford Dictionary are: antidisestablishmentarianism – opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England – 28 letters; loc-cina-ucini-hilipilification – the estimation of something as worthless – 29 letters; pneumono-ultra- microsocopic-silico-volcano-coniosis – a lung disease contracted from breathing in very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano; medically, it is the same as silicosis - 45 letters.

One of the longer words in the New Testament Greek language is anakephalaiossathai – translated into English as “to unite all things.” The word is 19 letters long and is found in Ephesians 1.

Ephesians 1:7-10 (ESV)

7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, 8 which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight 9 making known[a] to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

The phrase is used to describe what God is up to through Jesus. This is the only place in the Bible where this word occurs. “Ana” means “again”; “kephale” means “head.” So anakephalaiosasthai means to “bring things together under one head.”

According to St. Paul, God will refurbish everything, including us. The world, today, including us, is fractured, broken. It brings God pleasure to bring it all back together in unity – in Jesus. All of it...all of history. All of everything – every human included – put back together as it should be: including broken bodies and broken hearts. All things. Poverty, abuse, racism – all things made right again. Even fractured relationships. All things restored, reconciled, renewed – anakephalaiosasthai. According to Paul, this is what brings God pleasure. This is what God is up to in our world.

We would not know what God is up to simply by listening to tonight’s radio or television newscasts! What we hear mostly is about what went wrong in our world today. Bad news sells!

We need to listen to what God tells us through St. Paul to learn the good news about what God is up to in and through Jesus.

So don’t forget – anakephalaiosasthai – it will bring God and us pleasure! Pastor Dennis Drews

Mark 1:14, the first verse of our Gospel Lesson for January 24th, states that Jesus “came into Galilee”, thereby establishing the geographical setting for the first half of the Gospel according to Mark. Jesus came “proclaiming the gospel of God” and did that proclaiming not only with preaching words but also teaching words – and deeds! That’s his ministry.

An introduction to a commentary on Mark’s Gospel that I have, uses twenty-five pages to lay out the meaning of “gospel.” Yet Mark the writer of the Gospel takes just two verses, almost as if he had been challenged to say what Jesus’ message was while standing on one foot! While Mark as a whole presents the gospel about Jesus (Mk 1:1 “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”), our particular Gospel Lesson for this Sunday - Epiphany 3 (Mk 1:14-20) - summarizes the gospel Jesus preached in these words: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

What Jesus preaches is “the gospel of God” (Mk 1:14). The difference between this phrase (“gospel of God”) and the phrase “the gospel of Jesus Christ” (in Mk 1:1) is significant. Mark 1:1 uses “gospel” in the sense that Paul and the earliest Christian tradition (1 Corinthians 15:1-6) did: the good news about Jesus. In Mark 1:14, however, “gospel” is what Jesus preached about the kingdom of God.

We will be utilizing Mark’s remaining first chapter in the next two weeks. As we know, Mark’s Gospel is the shortest of the three – he is very brief, yet precise, in what he wrote.