Epiphany 5
Psalm 138; Isaiah 6:1-8,(9-13); 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11
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In “Room to Grow,” the final “Operation Reconquista” sermon, I argue that true church reform comes from faithfully teaching Scripture, not conforming to modern values, as God clears the “dead wood” to make room for a remnant to flourish.
I.
Today’s sermon is the third and final message in my “Operation Reconquista” series. That said, I hope to build on this foundation in future sermons. So, if you haven’t heard them, I encourage you to go back and read or listen to Part 1 and Part 2.
The first sermon was called “Return of the Exiles.” The second sermon was called “Taking God at His Word.” Today’s sermon is called, “Room to Grow.”
In case anyone is wondering, I am preaching on the texts for Epiphany 5, even though today is Epiphany 7. We’ve had snow and ice storms for the past two weeks and so we haven’t been able to meet for regular worship.
The point of the first sermon was that the mainline Protestant churches, despite their embrace of theological liberalism and progressive politics, have never lost the Bible.
When Ezra and Nehemiah led over 40,000 exiles back to Jerusalem to rebuild its walls and temple, they brought with them the sacred scriptures.
Ezra launched his reform of the Israelite religion by preaching the law of God in a clear way, so that the people could be taught the plain sense of the scriptures.
This must be the path forward for any Reconquista or reform of the mainline Protestant churches, or any church for that matter.
The point of the second sermon was that God cannot be separated from His word.
The past two Sunday’s we’ve heard Jesus say these words, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” by which Jesus meant that He was the literal fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about the coming Messiah.
Jesus was saying that He was the Messiah.
But the members of His hometown synagogue were insulted by Jesus’ sermon. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” by which they meant, “How can you be the Messiah when you’re just one of us? We know who you really are.”
They tried to separate Jesus from Christ. “Christ is fine,” they said, “but we won’t have Jesus putting on airs, getting above Himself, thinking He’s better than us.”
I used this to illustrate a habit that many Christians, many congregations, and, sometimes, entire denominations get into.
They get into the habit of saying, “God is fine, we’re happy to have Him, but we draw the line at all that old-fashioned Bible stuff. Some of what’s in that book is just plain out of step with our core values.”
You see the separation starting to occur right there. “I’ll take God, but not at His word.”
II.
Two weeks ago, I went up to Hartford to testify against a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would redefine discrimination on the basis of sex to include both sexual orientation and gender expression.
I quoted from Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
I testified that, “Sex is a category created by God and confirmed by nature and science.”
In other words, male and female are God-given, biblical categories, and these are the categories Christians need to think in.
Transwoman, transman, non-binary, these are not God-given biblical categories, and to think in terms of them is to think thoughts contrary to God’s thoughts.
This is the very nature of the rebellion in the Garden of Eden.
In Genesis 3:1, the serpent asks the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?”
In other words, “Let’s think outside the box, shall we?” as if God hadn’t put Adam and Eve in a glorious paradise, full of room to grow, but rather confined them to a dark prison cell.
Of course, I got a few angry letters in response to my testimony.
One read, “Your fairy tales are not more important than the rights and lives of others. If Jesus was real, he would be ashamed of you.”
Another said that I was out of step with the values of “love, compassion, inclusion, and acceptance.”
Of course, God is love, isn’t He? So, I ask, is there a better place to learn what love is than in His word, the Bible? 1 John 4:8.
Is there a more perfect compassion, which literally means “to suffer along with,” than Jesus on the cross who was “wounded for our transgressions”? Isaiah 53:5.
Is there an inclusion more complete than a savior who can take our place on the cross? 1 Peter 3:18.
Is there an acceptance we should be seeking other than that of presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God? Romans 12:1.
It is sickening to think of all the evil we do with our bodies nowadays, but I am stunned when I see the church not only accepting these evils but celebrating them.
This is exactly why the church needs to be reconquered, taken back, reformed.
Think of these categories like buckets.
You’ve got the love bucket, the compassion bucket, the inclusion bucket, and the acceptance bucket.
Now, you can fill those buckets up with man-made meanings, or you can let Scripture reveal to you the meanings that God has already given them.
Love. John 15:13, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Compassion. Psalm 51:1 (NIV), “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.”
God’s compassion does not celebrate our sins or tell us to take pride in them.
Instead, His compassion “blots them out.”
Inclusion. Acts 10:47, “Can any one forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”
The church includes everyone who receives the Holy Spirit, but that same Spirit convicts people of their sins. It convinces them they need help, that they need a Savior.
The Spirit doesn’t coddle sinners. The Spirit provokes sinners with a guilty conscience until they repent.
Acceptance. Hebrews 12:6 (NIV), “The Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.”
Yes, God accepts you, and the proof that He accepts you is the standard of holiness to which He holds you accountable.
He does not lower His standard to accommodate your perversions. Instead, He reaches down with His strong arm to pull you out of the muck you’re rolling in and clothes you in His own righteousness.
We can try to separate God from His word, but we’ll only end up fooling ourselves into thinking that lust can be called love, that compassion means we must condone sin, that inclusion means the righteous have to be silent in their own churches, and that acceptance requires us to turn a blind eye to all manner of indulgence.
Reconquista means finding the courage to stand up and say a resounding “No!” to all of this.
With that, let us stand and hear God’s word for us today from the Gospel of Luke.
Let us pray.
O God, we hear the words of Peter today to Jesus, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” We hear Isaiah in his weakness say, “Woe is me! For I am lost.” Indeed, we are sinners, and we are lost, but do not depart from us, O Lord. Instead, we ask you to bring fire to your church, O God, and to set it ablaze. May the words of your preacher today kindle a fire in this First Church of Woodbury. Amen.
Please be seated.
III.
The problem with a Reconquista, with the taking back, or the reformation of the Old Testament church, is that God didn’t want it to happen.
What other conclusion are we to draw from these words in Isaiah 6:9? “Go, and say to this people: ‘Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.’”
This is a word of judgment, spoken almost as an incantation, a blinding spell, a spell that causes deafness.
The next verse is even more potent, “Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”
God is turning the lights out in Judah. He is putting His chosen people to sleep. What’s worse is that Judah is on its sickbed, perhaps even its deathbed, and God does not want them to be healed.
Mind you, God’s word in the prophet Isaiah’s mouth could heal them.
After all, Isaiah who only just said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” had his lips healed by a coal from God’s altar.
So, Judah could have been saved, if the same healing fire from God’s altar had been ministered to them. But God’s word is clear. His charge to Isaiah is not to preach a healing word to them.
“Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”
Now, when I was called to First Church, I thought that maybe I could do some good. When I prayed about it, I thought I heard God telling me, “You could do some good.” Sasha thought the same thing.
I was eager to come here. I got off the first Zoom call with the search committee and I ran downstairs and said to Sasha, “Here am I! Send me.”
Wait, no, that’s what Isaiah said to God. I said to Sasha, “We’re going to Woodbury!”
Now, you’ll be glad to know that I did not hear God say, “Go to Woodbury and make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes.”
The call to go and preach God’s word is hard enough as it is — especially if you intend to be faithful to that word — so, in addition to that, you don’t need God to tell you, “Oh, by the way, your ministry is going to be a complete failure.”
But that’s what God tells Isaiah.
“For how long, God?” Isaiah asks.
And God replies:
“Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without men, and the land is utterly desolate, and the Lord removes men far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.”
“Ring! Ring!
‘Woodbury Chamber of Commerce, how may I help you?’
‘Yeah, there’s a new preacher in town and I’m worried there’s not going to be anything left of the place when he’s done!’”
Isaiah labored for 60 years in the southern kingdom of Judah. Legend has it that he was sawed in two by the wicked king Manasseh. He died about 100 years before his prophecies began to be fulfilled.
IV.
The key point here is that Isaiah was obedient to God’s call on his life. He was given God’s word, and he preached God’s word. He never tried to separate God from His word.
Think about it. That might have been very tempting. Just once during his ministry it might have done the prophet some good to see his congregation hear his words and be healed.
But Isaiah’s mission was to blind the church of his day so that it couldn’t see, and to strike it deaf so that it couldn’t hear.
Reconquista was not in the cards.
So, if God didn’t want Reconquista to happen, if He didn’t want to reform the Old Testament church according to the biblical standard, what did He want?
The answer is in Isaiah 6:13,
“‘And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak, whose stump remains standing when it is felled.’ The holy seed is its stump.”
The image here is of further destruction, this time by fire, but not the purifying fire from the coals of the altar of God.
This is the fire of judgment. There is plenty of fuel for this fire. Ironically, the fuel for the fire is the people of God, the old church herself.
There isn’t going to be any reform, and the utterly unreformed nature of Judah makes it perfect fuel for the fire.
But why?
You gardeners already know the answer, I am sure. The image is obvious. The tree has been pruned down to its root, to its “stump.” Why?
To give it room to grow back.
You see, I think the point here is that what we call “the church” so often isn’t. There is a lot of dry wood in the church. That dry wood is no good for anything except as fuel for the fire. In other words, it’s irredeemable.
Jesus Himself says as much and borrows images freely from Isaiah in His own preaching.
In John 15:6, Jesus says, “If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned.”
Jesus doesn’t say He will restore the man. Jesus says the man will be gathered with other withered men and burned.
The Greek word for gathered here is synagousin, from which we get the English word synagogue, which means a gathering or assembly.
The wordplay is interesting because in two verses in Revelation, 2:9 and 3:9, Jesus uses the phrase “synagogue of Satan.”
Those who belong to this synagogue, or assembly, or dare we even say church of Satan, are “those who say that they are Jews and are not.”
In other words, interlopers, imposters, those who do not belong.
Jesus is not interested in reforming them. There is no Operation Reconquista to try to win them back. They serve one purpose and one purpose only: they are fuel for the fire.
The point of this fire is to clear away all the dead wood so that the stump can grow back.
Now, this is a hard lesson to hear, very hard. It’s not difficult to understand, but hard for us to bear it when we finally do understand it.
Are we called to love these dead branches? Should we spend our time and resources drowning them in water so that they won’t burn? God’s wrath flashes hotter still, turning all to steam and vapor.
Can we show compassion to them, perhaps by making sure our own faith is as dead and dry as theirs? Then we will only go up in smoke with them when judgment comes.
Should we include them? Should we gather this dead wood into our churches so that we can try to save them?
Save them to what end?
These branches are dead and dry because they have severed themselves from the vine that is Christ.
Perhaps all we can do is accept that this is how God grows His church. He wants His church to grow, and this is the divinely appointed means by which He will give His church the room she needs to grow.
V.
That’s what I think the Reconquista of the mainline Protestant churches is going to look like. There will be a reckoning followed by a replanting.
“The holy seed is its stump.”
Or, to put it in terms of today’s gospel lesson, there will be a great catch, not of fish to be cooked and eaten, but of men and women.
Caught, or, if you will, snatched from the clutches of Satan, pulled alive from the sea of despair and rescued, so that they can go on to perform good and great works in the kingdom of God.
With that hopeful image, I conclude this “Operation Reconquista” series.
We have seen that the word of God written, which is the Holy Bible, is the standard for any church. This word is to be presented clearly by the ministers of the church and the plain sense of the word taught to the people.
It is not to be twisted out of all recognition or made to conform to man-made categories.
We have seen that we must not try to separate God from His word. To attempt this separation will only end up separating us from Christ. The result of this separation is visible in the dead and dying mainline churches all around us.
Finally, we have learned that this is as it should be. That this is the divinely appointed means by which God makes room for His holy seed to grow. He is clearing the ground so His remnant church can flourish.
I think this is why church reform movements have failed over the years.
Despite all the good it did, the Protestant Reformation splintered the universal church. If its goal was to reform the church singular, it failed.
Likewise, the Catholic Counter Reformation failed to heal the rift and only succeeded in ossifying the Roman Church into a religious bureaucracy and sacramental dispensary.
Even the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which admitted nearly 450 years later that the Protestant reformers had a point and got many things right, has left that organization much diminished.
It could be that God is using the current crisis in the church to shake off the chains of denominationalism. After all, there is only one church.
Centuries ago, churches like the one we’re gathered in were established in law. This congregation was part of the official, established Church of Connecticut.
Establishment, in time, gave way to denominationalism.
God often shifts history in order to clear the ground so that He can plant and replant His church.
Now, there are two things that I suspect do not sit well with you, and so we will begin an examination of them next week in a multi-part sermon series called “The Holy Seed” that will carry us through Lent.
The first thing that I suspect does not sit well with you is the idea of the holy seed itself. Just who is included in this remnant church?
The second concerns the dead branches we discussed above. Is there really nothing that can be done for them? After all, they are often our family, friends, and former church members.
Come the following Sundays to find out.
Let us pray.
Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins and give us, we beseech thee, the liberty of that abundant life which thou hast manifested to us in thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Preached on February 23, 2025 at the First Congregational Church, Woodbury, Connecticut.
Practical Applications
Stand on Scripture: Reject man-made meanings for love, compassion, inclusion, and acceptance. Fill these “buckets” with God’s definitions.
Say “No”: Courageously oppose sin masquerading as virtue in the church.
Trust God’s Process: Accept that some branches are dead by choice (John 15:6). Focus on the living remnant God is replanting.
Prepare for Growth: The church’s future lies in the holy seed, not the ashes of the past.
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