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"He Made Me a Believer"

#92-21
Presented on The Lutheran Hour on January 19, 2025
By Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler, Lutheran Hour Speaker
Copyright 2025 Lutheran Hour Ministries


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Text: John 2:11

Mister S. is the face of that school—at least at 7:30 in the morning, he is. I saw him out there, from the warm cocoon of my car. My heat was on full blast, but the indicator on my dashboard said the outside temp was 19 degrees. And Mister S. was out there, as always, standing out in front of the school, six-and-half feet tall, stocking hat donned, bearded like a grizzly bear, and as caffeinated as a night watch cop. Before this job, he had been a cop, I learned later. For 21 years, he'd served on the city's police force. And seven years ago, shortly after his dad died, he got a job at this school, where his dad had been a teacher for 50 years. And since then, every weekday morning he's out there, with one hand fist-bumping students as they arrive at school, and with the other, fisting a cup of tepid school cafeteria coffee.

"Yeah, I drink my coffee black," he growls with a gleam in his eye, "black like my heart." It's part of the facade he puts on, because he's in charge of security at an all-boys high school in the city, whose duties include but are not limited to breaking up fights, busting up cheating rings, and enforcing detention on boys caught vaping in the bathroom.

And that's why he's out there every school day, rain or shine. He's got to be the hard face of institutional discipline. So, in the mornings, he's out there to fist-bump, to greet them, all of them—the ones who are still half-asleep, the kid who just slammed the door to his mom's car, crying, the one who got out of his dad's car smelling like weed. Mister S. greets them by name. In the morning his face shines on all of them.

And watching him that morning from my car, I thought, "I believe in this." "Belief" in this case does not mean "I agree that this school exists." Of course, I agree that the school exists. But the fact that I think so is not what I mean when I say, "I believe." In this case, to believe is to be involved, to trust that the school is doing my boys good, and that it's helping me do my duty as a parent to raise them right. And so, it's worth my commitment and support and sacrifice. To believe in the school is to be involved, to be engaged in the program. And the more involved I am, the more I believe in it, and the more I believe in it, the more involved I am. Belief, here, doesn't just mean agreeing that something exists. Belief means involvement. And I believe in that school because of the faces.

In that moment, it was the face of Mister S. And if you believe in some institution, some team, some company, some association or congregation, I will bet that you have a face, at least one face associated with it. As it's said in the military, soldiers don't die for their country or their government; they die for their fellow soldiers, for the faces in the foxhole with them.

Sometimes it's said that young people these days don't believe in institutions. For them, even the word "institution" is unattractive. It means "out of touch" or "irrelevant," or maybe even "evil." Originally, "institution" just meant "something that's been set up," something built to last. But a lot of young people today don't believe in the programs set up by former generations, which means they're less involved, or not involved at all, because their parents' and grandparents' institutions have become faceless to them. And people don't believe in faceless institutions because it takes a face, a personal interaction, a personal relationship to create involvement. But the problem is, faces are finite and fallible. People are fallible. They let you down. They go wrong. They lose your trust. And people are finite. They don't stick around. They don't show up. And even the ones that do eventually die, which is why we set up institutions, because they're supposed to outlast individuals, and set individuals right when we go wrong. But as much as we need institutions, people will never believe in them without individual faces. But all those faces that make us want to be involved are fallible and finite.

That's the problem with institutions. They're supposed to supply what individuals lack, but we'll never believe in them without a face. So, each generation is faced with a choice. Do we disengage with the old institutions or make new ones? Do we support and adapt the ones we've inherited? Or do we give up entirely and look out only for ourselves?

People who have given up on institutions, who've decided not to be involved with anything that doesn't directly fulfill their felt needs, statistically find themselves empty and alone. But I'd say most of us fall somewhere in the middle. Some days we want to be involved. Other days we want to quit. And then you run into someone like a Mister S., standing out there at 7:30 on a 19-degree Tuesday morning, fist-bumping high school boys, and he makes you a believer again.

Christians are called "believers" not primarily because we agree that God exists and that Jesus Christ is God's Son. Of course, we agree that those statements are true, but that's not what makes us believers. As the Bible says, even the demons in hell agree that God and Jesus are for real. And the thought of it terrifies them (see James 2). No, Christians are believers because we've become involved.i In Jesus, we've seen the face of God. He's made us believers, and we entrust our lives to Him, we make sacrifices to be involved in His program, and the more involved we are, the more deeply we believe in Him, and the more we believe in Him, the more involved we become.

Involved in what? In God's institutions. And those are? We find them in the book of Genesis. In the first few chapters, we hear how God set up, or instituted, church, marriage, family, and work. First—church, which is simply a gathering of people who hear God speak, who listen to His promises for us and His commands to us. In those early chapters of Genesis, we hear God speaking with Adam and Eve, walking with them, talking with them: "I'll give you all the fruit of every tree on all the earth for food" (a promise, see Genesis 1:29; 2:16). "But don't eat the fruit of that one tree over there" (a command, see Genesis 2:17).

That's the church—people gathered to hear God's commands and promises. God instituted the church from the beginning, along with marriage and family and work. Marriage, because God made humanity complementary—male and female. "For this reason," it's said, "a man will leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two will become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). From marriage comes family, procreation, children. "Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth" (Genesis 1:28), make babies, raise kids, God says. And work: God puts humanity in the garden "to work it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15), to be involved with God's care for the creation. Church, marriage, family, work: it's all there in the first two chapters of the Bible. But then in chapter three, we hear how the devil corrupted God's institutions. He started by corrupting the church, by undermining our fellowship with God. All it took was a question: "Did God really say that? Did He really say you couldn't eat of that one tree? Don't you think that's a little petty of Him? What's He hiding from you? Does He really have your best interest at heart?" And that was enough for us to break faith, to hide from God's face, and to find all the reasons we needed not to be involved, but cocooned in ourselves, instead.

And so, humanity became unbelievers. It's not that people no longer agreed that God existed, although a very small percentage of humans in our day have come to that conclusion; roughly seven percent of the world's population is atheist, according to one estimate.ii But most people throughout world history have agreed that some God or gods created or fashioned or are somehow involved with the world. But they didn't know God as Adam and Eve had known God. They weren't part of God's fellowship, God's church. They weren't involved with God, they weren't trusting His promises, following His commands. So, things went wrong. How could they not? If you have a car but ignore the maker's operating instructions, it breaks down, eventually. If you have a friend, but never talk to him, the friendship will fade, eventually. But even unbelieving, people still used God's institutions: marriage, family, and work. But they used them for their own personal advantage or whim. And still today, we feel caught in this sense that we were all made to be involved with something bigger and better, but also cursed with the fallibility and finitude of every individual and institution.

So, God goes about winning back our involvement. How? He sends faces: people who will represent him: Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, the prophets. And ultimately, God sends His Son to be born and take a human face, so that when people looked in the face of this Man Jesus from Nazareth, they saw God's face. Jesus came to reassemble the church, to win back our involvement. Listen, a bit, to how He does it, as it's recorded in chapter 2 of the Gospel according to John. Listen to how Jesus owns and celebrates and corrects and fulfills those four ancient institutions: marriage, family, work, and church.

It happened like this: On the third day there was a wedding [a marriage] in [the town of] Cana, in [the region of] Galilee [where Jesus had grown up]. And Jesus' mother was at there. And Jesus with His disciples [the church], was also invited to the wedding.

When the wine had run out, Jesus' mother said to Him, "They have no wine." And Jesus says to her, "Woman, why do you involve Me? My hour has not yet come." His mother says to the servers, "Do whatever He tells you." Now, nearby stood six stone jars, the kind the Jewish people used for ceremonial washing, each holding from 20 to 30 gallons. Jesus says to the servers [to the workers], "Fill the jars with water." So they filled them to the brim. Then He says, "Now draw some out and bring it to the master of the [wedding] banquet." They did so. And when the master of the banquet tasted the water which had become wine—and he did not know where it had come from, but the servants, they knew—he calls aside the bridegroom and says to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and after the guests have had too much to drink, the cheap stuff. But you, you have saved the best till now."

What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of His signs. And He revealed His glory [he started his work, cf. John 9:4]. And His disciples [the church] believed in Him, put their faith in Him.

After this Jesus went down to Capernaum with His family—His mother and His brothers—and His disciples and stayed there a few days. When it was almost time for the Passover of the Jewish people, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And there in the temple courts [in the place that was supposed to be the church], He found people selling cattle and sheep and pigeons, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So, He made a whip out of cords and drove out all from the temple courts, both cattle and sheep, and He overturned the tables and scattered the coins of the money-changers, and to those who were selling pigeons, He said, "Get these out of here! Stop making My Father's House into a market." And His disciples remembered that it was written [in the Scriptures, in the psalms] "Zeal—passion for Your house [Your church] will consume Me—will burn in Me like a fire."

Now the Jews who were there said to Jesus, "What sign will You show us for doing these things?" Jesus answered, "Destroy this temple—grind it down to dust—and I will raise it in three days." They said, "It has taken 46 years to build this temple. And You will raise it in three days?" But the temple [the church] He was speaking of was His body. So after He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this, and they believed; they trusted the Scriptures and the Word that Jesus had spoken" [in other words, they became involved].

Twice in chapter 2 of John's biography of Jesus, we hear that the disciples believed, which doesn't mean that the disciples now give their assent to the idea that God and Jesus are real. Of course, they agree with that, but that's not the point, is it? Believing, here, means involvement. And how does Jesus get them involved? He works a sign, He does a work that only God can do. He makes over 100 gallons of wine from water with just a word, like making a hundred billion galaxies out of nothing with just a word. Which means, Jesus isn't just the face of an institution, He's the face of God—the infallible, infinite Creator, the One who's involved above and behind and beyond every individual and institution, and also has now become involved as one of us.And for His first faith-creating, belief-begetting, involvement-winning messianic sign, with some prompting from that disciple who's also His mother, Jesus gives a 100-gallon-sized fist bump to the bride and groom on their happy day, to bless their marriage and family and their work, to celebrate the institutions that He set up with His Father.

But there's more. Because in the second part of the chapter, Jesus enters the scene like a caffeinated grizzly bear, with a hard face against a corrupt institution. In this case, it's the temple in Jerusalem. The temple, whatever form it took in the Jewish people's long history, had one function—to be the church, to be the place where people hear from God. But they made it a market. They misused the institution, as people have done and still do with those other institutions God set up—using marriage and family and work—not as vehicles for self-giving service to our neighbors, but as ride-shares to serve our short-term felt-needs and then dropping them, sometimes not even with a tip.

So, Jesus exposes us to the hard truth of how we are going to ruin everything with our abuse—destroy it, dissolve it, return ourselves to dust. This message didn't sit well with those who held institutional power and privilege. So they crucified Him. And that's when Jesus did His greatest work. That's when His hour came—His greatest work on the cross, His glory. Not because He had to, but because He wanted to. Because of His love for us, Jesus became so involved with this broke-down world and its misused institutions that He took it all into Himself and died with it. He did it so He could start over with us. And rebuild.

First, He rebuilds the church—He offers himself as the living temple. Then He re-makes marriage in Himself. He offers us His hand to be our spiritual Bridegroom and makes our marriages in this life to be a sign: the life-long union between a man and a woman becomes a picture of the union with Jesus and His church (see Ephesians 5).

Then He recreates family in Himself. He gives us His Spirit so that we can become God's children, like Him. And when He rose from the dead, when He broke out of that death-cocoon for us, His friend mistook Him for the gardener (see John 20:15). Because He's got work to do. And He is involving us. And He still sends faces to win our involvement.

On that Tuesday morning, dropping off my boys at school, cozily ensconced in my vehicle, Jesus showed me the grizzly, friendly face of Mister S., the guy in charge of security at our local Christian high school. Now, I should tell you it's a Roman Catholic school, and we're Lutheran, and though we have our "history," we don't hold that against them, because Lutherans have a big enough picture of the church to know we're not the only ones who belong to Jesus.

So, Mister S.—he is a small but important part of the body of Christ. And in his face, I see Jesus. He doesn't have to be out there, you know. His official job description doesn't dictate it. He's out there because of the love of Jesus, the love the students, the love for the institution, the love for the church. And that morning, when I saw him, I believed, which is to say that the Lord prompted me to be involved, even though I didn't think my hour had come to get out of my warm car, Jesus kept pushing me. So, I stopped to buy Mister S. some fresh coffee to refill his cafeteria cup that had surely gone cold by now. I parked my car, got out, gave him the coffee (no cream) and chatted with him for 20 minutes. In between him exchanging fist-bumps with the boys, he told me about his mom and dad, both of whom are now deceased, but raised five kids together and had been educators in Catholic Christian schools for over half a century.

The other morning, cozy in my bed, when my alarm went off, the wind was howling outside our bedroom window. I checked my phone and saw that the temperature was in the teens, but with the windchill, it said, "feels like zero." I wondered, "Would Mister S. be out there this morning?" I believed he would. So, I got up and got to it, too. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.

i Cf., Wilfred Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 5.
ii Peter Harrison, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 6n10.




Reflections for January 19, 2025
Title: He Made Me a Believer

No reflection segment this week.




Music Selections for this program:

"A Mighty Fortress" arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.

"From God the Father, Virgin-Born" arr. Kenneth Kosche. From Now Praise the Lord! Music from the Chapel of Christ Triumphant (© 1991 Concordia University-Wisconsin / GIA Publications)

"Crucifer" by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.

"The Only Son from Heaven" From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.


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