A Bar at the Folies Bergère

The Gospel Reading: Christ Risen and the Promise of Repentance and Forgiveness

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith.

Alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg.

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, the 24th chapter. Glory to you, O Lord. As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, Peace to you. But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a ghost.

And he said to them, Why are you troubled? And why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.

And when they had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy, they were marveling. He said to them, Have you anything here to eat? So they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.

And then he said to them, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

You are witnesses of these things, and behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you, but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus.

Amen.

All right.

So a little bit of, it seems like I'm going to start off on a tangent, and I think I need.

To.

So you know me. I like photography. Art is something that I do to keep my sanity, because my other day job requires me to slog through copious amounts of heresy, and Joshua, my son, describes that as the swamp of sadness.

Swamp of sadness. That's not a bad way to think about it. So art is something that I use to keep my sanity, and so I thought I would do something kind of fun, something kind of Renaissance, right? So what I thought I would do is take a class online on art history.

I'm thinking, why not study the masters and really study art, because, you know, it's pretty. Well, I've been listening to a series of lectures in my art history class online by a French gal by the name of Lise Martineau.

Now that's how she pronounced her name. I'm just mimicking it. I don't know any French. And she was doing an in-depth analysis of the message that is encoded in Manet's last painting, which I've reproduced in your bulletin.

The name of the painting is A Bar at the Falaise Bergeret, and it's pretty. I mean, there's that girl. She's dressed opulently, and of course, you've got the wonderful inside interior of this facility, the Falaise Bergeret, and you've got the gilded ceilings and the chandeliers and all this kind of stuff.

And I was thinking, this should be an interesting lecture, right? Well, let me do a little bit of digression here, all right? We'll talk about this and what it means, because it has everything to do with, well, our good works.

And so I'm going to interpret this as a theologian. It's through the lens, then, of our gospel text, and then a little bit more of 1 John. So we live in the 21st century, right?

Yeah.

Sin, Sexual Revolution, and the Hypocrisy of Civilized Culture

So here it is, 2021, and everything wrong with our society, who have we been blaming.

It on?

You know, well, the boomers, right? And especially those ones that brought us the sexual revolution, because have you noticed that, well, you know, society as it is, the whole thing regarding sexual immorality has just run amok in our nation, right?

Well, I hate to say this, but my art history class has proven to me that the sexual revolution isn't the problem. You know what the problem is? We are the problem, sin that dwells within us. And so I would note that this particular painting, although it's hard for me to explain the finer interpretations of it that Manet put the code, coded in here, but what he is doing in this painting is talking about the state of affairs and the overt hypocrisy of so-called civilized culture in France in the end of the 1900s.

Now, let me talk about what happened that kind of busted things open for people in Europe at the time. If you remember the middle of the 1900s, we get Darwin writing The Origin of Species,.

Right?

He writes The Origin of Species, and then he writes another book that talks about how the different genders supposedly descended using evolution. And in Darwin's theory that he postulated regarding how we now have different genders, he basically says that the first humans that evolved from monkeys and apes, that they had both sexes in one person, and then eventually that split out.

And that men evolved quicker than women, and he overtly taught that women are inferior to men, inferior. And now you're sitting there going, I think we should stone Darwin. I agree.

Let's get to it.

But anyway, but here's the idea then is that in then his ideal understanding, at least he thinks scientific understanding of how the genders should relate, he believed that men should be catabolic. That was the term he used, basically meaning strong, rugged, intellectual, getting things.

Done.

Women, on the other hand, the ideal evolved woman is anabolic, which means she's supposed to be kind of weak and faint and things like this. And then according to then Spencer, who followed Darwin, Spencer basically postulated that in this society then, a good civilized society has a big distinction between the sexes according to catabolic and anabolic categories.

And because women are so weak, they really shouldn't be spending time intimately with their husbands unless for the purpose of procreation. I want you to think about this. No intimacy in marriage unless it's for procreation.

In fact, the women in France at the time wore a set of pajamas that allowed easy access for intimacy should the reason arise for procreation. And what this ended up doing was destroying families, destroying them all in the name of science.

And of course, the French were also overtly Catholic, and so the Roman Catholic Church was completely on board with this idea. That's right. Human intimacy only for the purpose of procreation. Well, we all know how that's going to work because our marriages are our most intimate relationships.

And you'll note, Scripture teaches us that it is within the context of marriage that we not only procreate, but that we also have that important relationship that in so many ways symbolizes the body of Christ and their relationship to Jesus.

And without that intimacy, well, what ends up happening? Well, in France, and this is what Manet is basically holding up to people's noses and faces, what ended up happening is that prostitution ran amok.

Men's most intimate relationships were with expensive courtesans. And what we see in this painting, you can't really see it too well here, but if you see a color version of it, is that we're looking at a woman who's standing behind a bar.

And if you look in the background in the gallery, you can see men sitting with their, well, not their wives. Their wives wouldn't dress this way. They're sitting with their courtesans. This is their most intimate relationship.

And in France, what ended up happening is that with prostitution running amok, we're talking literally hundreds of thousands of women throughout Paris, some of them legal, some of them illegal. And what ended up happening is that these men spent their energies on their prostitutes rather than their wives.

It just destroyed the family. All under the pretense of men who were religiously attending church while at the same time embracing the spirit of the age. And so what we see in this painting, which is kind of haunting, is a woman with kind of a blank stare on her face.

And based on the way that she is dressed and in the context of where she is, Manet is subtly revealing that she is a clandestine prostitute. And that you can see then in the reflection over on the right-hand side that she's being propositioned by a man.

And as beautiful as it is, what he's doing is showing the hypocrisy that's going on in a civilized society that claims to be religious and follow Jesus Christ. The other part that's a little bit more interesting is that the woman, the way she's posed is intentionally designed to mimic one of the most popular ways of depicting the Virgin Mary at that time, with her hands open, kind of like this.

You've probably seen the statue. And the face that she has, that kind of blank expression, is the same exact expression as Jesus' expression in a famous painting depicting him coming in glory to judge the living and.

The dead.

And what Manet is doing here is basically holding up to people their rank hypocrisy. While claiming to be religious, they are engaging in overt sexual immorality. Sounds like the sexual revolution, right?

Right.

And so, a little bit of another side note along these lines, I know the art history lesson is a little bit odd for a sermon, but the other part of this is that with the rise of this was the rise of syphilis.

And y 'all remember the suffragettes in the United Kingdom in the beginning of the 20th century? What was their slogan? You probably know half their slogan. Votes for women. That was a claim, right? Votes for women.

We all know that part of it, but there was a second half to that slogan because there's a comma that comes after votes for women. The other one was chastity for men. What we saw in the rise of the suffragettes was a reaction against the rank immorality that had run through Europe into the UK and other places as a result of the embracing of the revolutionary ideas of evolution.

And as a result of it, what was happening is that men were going to the brothels, bringing syphilis home to their families, giving it to their wives, and when they would get pregnant, their children would be born either dead or severely infected with syphilis.

And the women said, enough is enough. And this was all under the guise of a Christian nation, under the eyes of people attending.

Church.

And so we've got to recognize here that I almost consider that to be more wicked than what we see happening in our days. Because in our days, people don't even care about Christianity, right? Most people who are embracing the new morality, they have no desire to be Christians or attend.

Church.

And granted, it's coming to the church, but it's time for us to get real about something. And that is that with the good news of Christ risen from the dead, the scriptures reveal very clearly that we are set free from sin.

We are not set free to sin. And so in that context, here again, the words of Christ from our gospel text, Jesus, after appearing to his disciples, he says to them so clearly that he's not a ghost. He even asked for something to eat.

And then he notes that these were the words that I spoke to you, that while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled, thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and then on the third day rise from the dead and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem.

You see, it is incomplete to say that, oh, it's all about God being love and God forgives.

Sins.

Indeed, he does. Christ bled and died for all of our sins. But even Peter, in his preaching from our first reading today, calls the people to repent. And you'll note that in Peter's sermon here after God healed the man who was paralytic, that Peter makes it clear that each and every one of us, we are responsible for the death of Christ.

You'll note that Peter just indiscriminately in this sermon says that you denied the holy and the righteous one and you asked for a murderer to be granted to you. Have you ever stopped to think, how could he possibly do such a thing?

Was he taking names? Was there a roll call? Was there a sign-up sheet on that good Friday when Christ was on trial? And he says, I know that you were there, Itzhak, and you Abraham, I saw you there, and Jacob and Shlomo, you were all there.

He doesn't do that. He tells the crowd who had gathered there that day, that they were the ones responsible and by extension, you and I are responsible too. I killed Christ. You killed him. You asked for a murderer to be released to you instead of Christ.

And as Peter then goes on to say, we are all guilty then of killing the author of life, but God has raised him from the dead. And because Christ is raised from the dead, we know that there is mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation in Christ.

And so what does Peter do? He calls the people to repent. He says, repent therefore, turn again so that your sins may be blotted out and that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.

And what does he mean by times of refreshing?

What does he mean?

You know, we're not talking about sitting down and having a nice iced tea on a warm summer day. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about the buffeting impact and consequences of sin. The life that we are living right now is described as, well, in arid, deserty wilderness terms.

This is no place to lay down stakes for the long term. You're only sojourning through here. This is not a proper place to live forever. Instead, we are looking forward to a land that flows with milk and honey, a true promised land, the new earth.

But in the meantime, Christ offers us refreshment. And that is the refreshment, not only of the confidence that there is forgiveness in him for every one of our sins, but also the refreshing work of the Holy Spirit and producing in us now the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control. These sound very refreshing. And the idea here is that sin is the opposite of refreshing. Have you ever noticed that you are most disgusted, most ashamed of yourself when you always fall short?

It's never our sin that we're proud of. It's always the stuff that we know that we're doing according to God's will. And so with that, consider then the words of our epistle text. In our epistle text, and I'm going to kind of focus in on the family aspect of it, we remember last week we heard from the Apostle John that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

This is true. But if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. And all of this because Christ has died in our place. And so if we say we have not sinned, we make God out to be a liar.

And then he gives us these comforting words. Don't lose these words as we continue through this passage, because if you lose these words you're going to mess up a proper understanding of what John is saying.

He says, I'm writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, and we have this week and today and we will tomorrow, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

He is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the.

Whole world.

And then he goes on in verse 7, and this begins to form the immediate context of our epistle text today. He says, I am writing to you no new commandment, but an old commandment. Remember, repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Repentance so that God will send refreshing. So here's the new, it's not a new commandment, but an old one. And the old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.

Because Christ is risen from the dead, we have assurance then that the darkness that we were born into, the darkness that we still struggle within ourselves, the darkness that surrounds us, those who oppose Christ, that this all is passing away, and the light of Christ is already shining from the empty tomb.

All of that being said, whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness, and walks in darkness, and doesn't know where he's going, because the darkness has blinded him.

And so now he starts to bring in family-type language. It is inappropriate. It is out of bounds. Not only is it out of bounds and inappropriate, it is flat out contrary to Scripture to hate your brother.

In fact, John is clear that if you are doing this, you are not walking in the light. So who is your brother? Well, let's start here. Take a look around. Brothers and sisters, we are all in Christ, and the Scripture refers to the saints always in terms of family.

Y 'all are my brothers and my sisters. Y 'all are family. But I would also note then this, that each and every one of us, we also have a mom and a dad. Many of us are married and we have a husband or a wife, or we have children, or we have brothers and sisters and cousins.

And you'll note, is it me, maybe it's just me, that being sanctified in the context of a household is always so challenging, right? You put a bunch of sinners under the same roof, and you know what they do?

They annoy each other. Have you ever noticed that? And families, what do they do? Well, they don't always get along. Sometimes they fight. Maybe mom gets upset and annoyed and erupts like a volcano, and then dad does too, and then the kids start kicking the cat, and it just goes from there.

You get what I'm saying, right? But you're going to note then, in the last words, the very last sentences of the Old Testament, the prophecy given regarding John the Baptist talks about something very interesting.

Last words of the Old Testament read as thus, Behold, I will send to you Elijah the prophet before the great and the awesome day of Yahweh comes, and he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.

And so you'll note here that one of the real fruits of the Holy Spirit is the repentance that comes that leads to fathers having their hearts turned back to their children. And notice it doesn't say mothers to their children, because moms don't seem to have a struggle in that department for the most part, but when a father turns, the mom comes along as well.

It is talking about the wholeness that comes, the refreshing that we can have, even in our own families. And this is the thing that we all long for, is it not? Is it not the reason why there's so much rampant sexual immorality and just nonsense that goes on from age to age to age?

Is it not because we are seeking love? We all are. Well, but according to that old country and western song, many of us are looking for love in all the wrong places, right? The reality is this. What we are called to as Christians is to sacrificially love each other, even if you're not getting love in return, and that's the hard thing.

Children of God, the World, and the Practice of Righteousness

So coming back then to our epistle text, hang on a second here, I've got to get there. Watch where John goes. He says, I am writing these things to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for His name's sake.

The refreshing that comes from the Holy Spirit through repentance and the forgiveness of sins then takes little children so that they obey the fourth commandment willingly. Not perfectly, but willingly.

I'm writing to you, fathers, because you know Him who is from the beginning. I'm writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, children, because you know the Father.

I write to you, fathers, because you know Him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong and the Word of God abides in you and you have already overcome the evil one.

And so because we have been united with Christ in His death and His resurrection in the waters of baptism, note then, we are not trying to overcome the evil one. You couldn't do that if you wanted to anyway.

Christ has already overcome Him and proven so by rising from the dead. And because we are in Him, we share in His victory and we have already overcome the evil.

One.

So then here is the admonition that John gives us. Do not love the world or the things that are in the world. Listen, the world isn't gonna lead you to Christ. It's not. The world's narratives and the values and the ideas that are in vogue today, they're gonna fall by the wayside in a decade anyway and another crop of weird ideas are gonna come up and everyone's gonna embrace the new thing.

You know what you're supposed to do? Ignore it. Don't love the world. Don't even listen to it. You see, anyone, John says, who loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. All that is in the world, and it's all categorized in these three distinctions.

The desires of the flesh, yeah, I see that on the internet. Desires of the eyes, yeah, you know, for all those bright, shiny, sparkly things that there are in the world, have you gotten rid of your car that you bought five years ago?

I mean, it's perfectly good, but of course, you've gotta get the latest one with the leather seats and the GPS that drives itself and all that, right? Isn't this how we work? Just watch the commercials and always, always, always, always, you're just, you are the desires.

Of the eyes.

I've gotta have the latest and the greatest, and then also the pride of life, the pride of life talking about all that we seek for power and glory for ourselves. This is not from the Father, it's from the world, and the world is passing away with its desires, and we know this because Christ is risen from the dead.

So whoever does the will of God then abides forever. Now the next section here in this epistle is going to be a warning against Antichrist, but I've got a whole sermon on that coming up in a couple weeks.

We'll talk about that then. So then watch where he goes. Verse 28 of chapter two, and now little children, ah, I like this, I like this a lot. Here's the reason why. You wanna know how God looks at you?

Remember, we have the spirit of adoption because Christ has bled and died for us. We have been regenerated, united with him. We are now God's children presently, and here God, the Holy Spirit, is reminding us that not only are we his children, oh, but he refers to us as his little children, his little ones, and aren't the little ones always so fun to care for and stuff, right?

Exactly. You and I are God's little children. He says this, abide then in him so that when Christ appears, we may have confidence not to shrink back from him and shame at his coming. If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.

Now I know a thing or two about practice. Notice it's not saying you have to be sinless. The idea here is that because we have been regenerated, because we are in Christ, because we have the Holy Spirit, because we live in repentance, what do we practice?

Righteousness, all right? Now, back in the day, I used to play golf. The reason I don't play golf anymore is because I didn't need a mistress, and golf is like a mistress, all right? It requires a lot of practice.

You have to practice your long game. You have to practice your mid-irons. You have to work on your short game. You have to work on your putting. And of course, always the psychological aspects, because always and again when you're playing golf, the whole game occurs right here in your head.

So if you have a bad shot, you can easily go into a fit, and that fit will cause another bad shot, and it's just a mess. So in order to be good at golf, you gotta practice. And you know what? I was tired of putting in the time necessary to practice golf, because at the end of the day, that's just recreation.

You know where I really need to practice? I need to practice being a good husband. I need to practice being a good father. I need to practice being a good pastor. I need to practice being a good friend.

That's what I need to practice at. And when we apply ourselves to practicing righteousness and selflessly loving others, we'll never be perfect at it. Not until Christ returns or we're with Him in glory, but we'll get better at it.

Practice in this case doesn't make perfect, but practice is one of those things that we can all do. On the contrary then, you'll note that practicing evil is the opposite of what we're called.

To.

So then again, hear again these assuring words. See what kind of love the Father that He has given to us. I always consider this next part to be almost like whispering scandalous things, that we should be called the children of God.

That's right, we. I mean, look around. What a motley crew we are.

Bunch of sinners.

Can you believe it? See what kind of love the Father that He's given to us, that we should be called the children of God.

Are you nuts?

Right?

I like to say that when I get to heaven, the prostitutes and the tax collectors are going to go, oh, good night. God's letting anyone in now, right? That's the whole point. That's the scandal of the cross, that real sinners like you and me that we're forgiven.

But see what kind of love, love. I love this word, that love the Father that He's given to us. And the reason why then the world does not know us is because it didn't know Him. You see, because being selfish and focusing in on the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I, that's not love.

It's narcissism. And when we are narcissistic, we are most like the devil. Yet the world doesn't know us. It didn't know Him. Beloved, we are God's children. And here's the important word, now. You do not need to strive to be God's children.

God has made you His children. And you are that now. And what we will be, well, it's not yet appeared. But we know that when Jesus appears, we're going to be just like Him because we shall see Him as He is.

And everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself as He is pure, purifies himself through the forgiveness of sins that is offered in Christ. But everyone who makes a practice of sinning, if that's what you're really practicing, well, you're also practicing lawlessness.

And sin is lawlessness. You know that He appeared then in order to take away sins. And in Him, there is no sin. You see, sin is not freedom. Sin is slavery. Going back to sin is like the children of Israel in the wilderness saying, we got to go back to Egypt.

Life ain't that way. That's slavery. And neither is sin. Sin is slavery. It's not freedom. So no one who abides in Him keeps on making a practice of sinning. No, the one who keeps practicing sinning has either seen Him or known Him.

It's neither. And so, little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous as He is righteous. And we practice righteousness because we are God's children now. And that's what God's children do.

Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil. The devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. Sin in all of its ways. So no one born of God makes a practice of sinning.

God's seed abides in Him. And He cannot keep on practicing sinning because He has been born of God. So by this, it is evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.

So brothers and sisters, you'll note then, this is some tough law for us to hear. But it's necessary. Because each and every one of us still has our old sinful nature clinging to our necks, desiring to follow the world and its messages, to follow the world and its beliefs, to follow the world and its morals.

And each and every one of us is tempted to despise the ones closest to us and think only about ourselves. But this is not appropriate for those who are in Christ. So again, let us heed the words of the Apostle Peter.

Let us repent so that times of refreshing may come. Because Christ is risen from the dead.

He is risen indeed.

Alleluia.