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Pray to the Father, who loves you

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Sermon for Easter 5 – Rogate

James 1:22-27  +  John 16:23-30

We’re focused on prayer today. There are countless examples of prayer in the Bible, and many passages in the Gospels in which Jesus teaches His disciples to pray, and how to pray. We have a wonderful teaching tool concerning prayer in the 3rd Chief Part of Luther’s Small Catechism, the part on the Lord’s Prayer. But this 5th Sunday after Easter, Rogate Sunday, is the only Sunday in the historic Church year whose Gospel touches on prayer. So we’ll use this opportunity both to hear again what Jesus teaches us about prayer, and to take to heart His encouragement to pray and to ask.

Let’s start with how we use certain words. The word “pray” in Scripture has a couple of different uses. It can mean simply to “ask.” I pray God for a pleasant outcome. I pray you for a glass of water. There are certain words in Hebrew and Greek that simply mean, “ask.” But that’s not how we normally use the word in English anymore, nor is it the main word for prayer in the Bible. Normally, “to pray” means to speak to God, which is the same as “calling upon” God or upon the name of God, for any and every purpose. And there are three basic purposes for praying to God. To confess one’s sins to God, to praise and thank God, and to ask God for something, either for ourselves or on behalf of others.

Psalm 51 gives us an example of confession within a prayer. David cries out to God, “For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight.”

Jesus shows us how to give thanks in a prayer. He says in Matthew 11, “I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes. Yes, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight.”

Then there are those many, many examples of prayers that ask God for something, making requests of God. “Lord, have mercy!” is the simplest but most all-encompassing request a person can make. All seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer fall into this category, where we approach our Father in heaven with seven short and simple requests, where we ask Him for things that we need. A single prayer may well include all three things: a confession of our sins, a request for God’s mercy and forgiveness, and a word of praise for God’s abundant mercy, faithfulness, and forgiveness in Christ.

To whom should we pray? When the word means simply to “ask” someone for something, that word is used in the Bible for both God and men. You can ask God for mercy, you can ask the king for mercy. Elijah could ask God to send rain, or Jesus could ask the Samaritan woman for a drink of water. But the regular word used for “prayer” in Scripture, for calling upon the name of someone, for “invocation,” is always and only used for praying to God (or to false gods). In the Old Testament, it was always and only the LORD to whom Israel was supposed to pray. In the New Testament, Jesus teaches us to pray to “our Father in heaven,” and the vast majority of examples of prayer in the New Testament are prayers to God, in general, or to God the Father in particular. But prayers to Jesus are also prayers to God, so occasionally the apostles also speak of “calling on the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Either way, “to pray,” in Scripture, is to call upon the name of God—or someone whom you perceive to be God. And it’s, therefore, by definition, an act of worship.

This is important, so we we’re going to spend some time on it. You know that, some time after the Scriptures were written, some teachers arose within the Christian Church who began to teach Christians to pray not only to God, but also to others, to the souls of certain saints in heaven. Here are the reasons why that’s a problem:

First, the Scriptures, and Jesus Himself, already taught us to whom we should address all our prayers: to the LORD God alone, to our Father in heaven, or to the Lord Jesus, who is also God, and the one Mediator between God and man. All prayers, like all forms of worship, are to be given to God.

Second, we have no command or permission from God to call upon the name of anyone else.

Third, we do have commands from God forbidding any attempted communication with the dead. The Bible refers to that as witchcraft or sorcery or necromancy, and God says that He hates all such practices.

Now, the argument is made that praying to Mary for help, or asking for her intercession, is no different than asking your Christian friend for help, or to pray for you. Paul asks the Ephesian Christians to pray for him, doesn’t he? But Paul doesn’t pray to the Ephesians to ask for their prayers. He writes them a letter, which they can read with their eyes and hear with their ears, where they can read of his request and then pray to God for him. That’s vastly different than trying to communicate with someone who has died. And the argument is made that the souls of the departed are not dead but alive! Well, that was just as true in the Old Testament, as Jesus says about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and yet, through Moses, God still forbade His people from trying to communicate with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Fourth, we have no reason to believe that any departed brother or sister in Christ is able to hear a single prayer or request, much less the prayers of Christians from around the world. Think about that. Why can God hear the prayers and petitions of Christians anywhere in the world? Because of His divine attributes. Because God sees the heart. He is omniscient, omnipresent, and eternal, which means He’s outside of time. As the Psalm says, O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether. But none of that is true of our departed brothers and sisters, including Mary, including the apostles. To imagine that a departed brother or sister can hear the whispers from a single person’s lips, or can (simultaneously!) hear the prayers of thousands of Christians around the world, is to ascribe divine attributes to that departed brother or sister, and that is nothing short of turning them into gods, which is nothing short of idolatry.

But finally, praying to or invoking anyone besides God is a waste of time, because we have God’s own repeated promises to hear our prayers and to help us in the day of trouble. And that’s the part of today’s Gospel that I would have you focus on. Jesus says to His disciples: Truly, truly I tell you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give you. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full. Ask the Father, Jesus says. Ask Him! Ask Him directly! Only do it “in My name.”

What does that mean? It doesn’t mean just adding a perfunctory, “In Jesus’ name” to the beginning or end of a prayer. It means praying to God the Father as one who believes in the name of Jesus, who trusts in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent by God the Father to be the Savior of the world and the one Mediator between God and man. It means holding up to God the Father not a single work of our own, not a bit of worthiness on our part, but only the merit of Jesus as the basis for His mercy and help. It means approaching God the Father as Jesus Himself approached His Father, with heartfelt thankfulness, with perfect trust in His will, asking for the things that Jesus taught us to ask for, as in the Lord’s Prayer, and also asking for things that we want, but only if it’s what He wants for us, as our wise and gracious Father. All of that is included in praying in Jesus’ name.

And why will the Almighty God and Father hear us and grant our requests? (This may be the most amazing part.) Because the Father himself loves you. The word for love here is special. It’s not that usual Greek word for love, agape, the word for God’s heartfelt care and concern for people, as in, God so loved the world. No, here it’s the Greek word philos, the love of friendship, the love of finding something attractive in another person, not in a romantic way, but in a friendly way, where people share common interests, where you like to be around certain people because of their character, or their good reputation, or their personality. What is it that makes God the Father like to be around us? Jesus told His disciples. The Father loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came forth from God. God the Father gave His most precious gift to the world, His beloved, only-begotten Son, to be our Savior, to teach us who God is and, most of all, to reveal His mercy and love toward sinners, and His fervent desire that all men should be saved, saved through faith in Christ Jesus. The Father is the One who drew us to Jesus in the first place, through His Word, by His Spirit, and who persuaded us to believe in Him, and to love Him. And then, amazingly, because the Father has first drawn us to Jesus, the Father is now drawn to us in love as those who love Jesus, because everything centers around Him.

Now, because the Father loves you, who love Jesus, that’s why you should ask Him. That’s why you should pray to Him. Because He’s not some distant, hard-to-please, needs-to-be-convinced-to-care kind of God. He loves you! He’s eager to hear from you! He’s just waiting to answer your prayer, to give you what you ask for in Jesus’ name. What’s more, He deserves an apology from you when you sin against Him, doesn’t He? Have you ever thought about it that way, about what God deserves? He also deserves your praise and thanksgiving. He deserves your worship. He deserves your prayers.

And so, because of our great need, because of the great needs of those for whom we pray, because of the powerful enemies we have in this world, because of God’s command and promise, because of God’s love for you who believe in His Son, and because God deserves our worship, our prayers, and our praise, pray, dear Christians! Pray to the Father who loves you! Ask, and you shall receive, that your joy may be full! Amen.

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Yes, sing to the Lord!

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Sermon for Midweek of Easter 4 – Cantate

Isaiah 12:1-6  +  2 Corinthians 5:14-21

This last Sunday, the 4th Sunday after Easter, was called Cantate Sunday. Cantate—sing!, from the Introit, Oh, sing to the Lord a new song, for He has done marvelous things. In line with that, in the reading you heard this evening from Isaiah 12, the prophet also calls upon Israel, including Christians, to “sing to the Lord.” And he spends the six short verses of this chapter giving us the inspiration behind the song.

He begins, In that day you will say. In what day? In the day he just described in chapter 11. In the day when there comes forth a Rod from the stump of Jesse, when a Branch grows from his roots, upon whom the Spirit of the Lord would rest in fullest measure. This Rod, this Branch, this “Root of Jesse” would grow, and would judge in favor of the poor and the meek. He would slay the wicked with the breath of His mouth, and rule over God’s people in righteousness and in peace. Not only that. He would also stand as a banner, as a tall flag, summoning people, gathering people to Himself from all the nations, Jews and Gentiles, all coming together and rallying around Him, resting in Him, and conquering all their enemies through Him.

“The day” Isaiah is talking about is this entire New Testament era, the era that began with the birth of the Rod, the Root, the Branch of Jesse, the Lord Jesus, who was born of Mary, descended from and a legal heir of David, the son of Jesse. He’s talking about how the Spirit would rest on Jesus. He’s talking about what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians about in tonight’s second lesson, how God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their sins against them. That’s a reference both to the suffering and death of Christ, which were the reconciling price required to reconcile sinners with God (in other words, the atonement that Christ made for sin), and it’s a reference to the ministry that Jesus carried out, calling sinners to repent and to come to Him for rest. He is the Reconciler of God and man. He is the One who brings us God, the offended party, and man, the offending party, back into harmony, back into fellowship. His sacrifice as our Substitute was the price of reconciliation. His ministry of inviting sinners to be reconciled to God through Him is the manner of reconciliation.

And that’s a ministry that goes on and on until Christ comes again. The “day” of Isaiah is still happening as the ministry of reconciliation continues, as Christ continues to serve as a banner for the nations, as He continues to gather people from every nation into His Holy Christian Church. The “day” is still happening, when Christ reigns over His Church in righteousness. And the “day” will be complete when Jesus comes back to destroy all the enemies of His people, and to bring us into the perfect rest of the new heavens and the new earth.

That’s “the day.” And in that day, Isaiah says, you will say: O LORD, I will praise You; Though You were angry with me, Your anger is turned away, and You comfort me. Behold, God is my salvation, I will trust and not be afraid; ‘For YAH, the LORD, is my strength and song; He also has become my salvation.’ ” Therefore with joy you will draw water From the wells of salvation.

Who is the “you”? It’s those with whom the Lord was angry. That applies to the impenitent sinners in Israel, but also to the rest of the world. As Paul writes to the Ephesians, we were all dead in sins and trespasses. We were all “children of wrath” by nature. But because of Christ’s sacrifice and because of Christ’s ministry of reconciliation, God is no longer angry with those who take refuge in His Son. Instead, He comforts them. He has saved them, by grace, through faith in the Lord Jesus. These are the ones who will praise the LORD in that “day” of salvation. These are the ones who will sing to the LORD, because they know Him, we know Him, to be our strength and our song. We know Him to be our Savior from sin, death, and the devil, who willingly suffered and died for our sins, who reigns in righteousness now and who will soon return to redeem us from every evil. This is the reason why Christians sing to the Lord.

Isaiah not only tells us why we will sing. He also gives us some of the lyrics of the song. In that day you will say: “Praise the LORD, call upon His name; Declare His deeds among the peoples, Make mention that His name is exalted. Sing to the LORD, For He has done excellent things; This is known in all the earth. Cry out and shout, O inhabitant of Zion, For great is the Holy One of Israel in your midst!”

What do we sing? What message do Christians proclaim? “His deeds.” God’s deeds. That includes His great deeds of creation, providence, and preservation. It also includes His deeds of salvation, Christ’s deeds of suffering and dying for all men, God’s desire that all men should be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. And, yes, it also includes His deeds of judgment against the enemies of His blood-bought people.

And where do we proclaim His deeds? “Among the peoples.” Among the nations. Wherever you live. Declare the excellent things that God has done, and declare it, not as a chore, not as a heartless lesson for the lecture halls, but with joy. The joy of the Gospel must accompany our song. If we stop and think about the destruction toward which we were headed, and the lengths to which our God has gone to make sure we were saved from it, if we stop and think about the love of Christ for sinners like us who deserve nothing from Him but wrath and condemnation, then we won’t be able to help but sing for joy for the marvelous deeds of the Lord. Amen.

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The Holy Spirit will be your Advocate

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Sermon for Easter 4 – Cantate

James 1:16-21  +  John 16:5-15

On the night before He died, Jesus told His disciples that He would be going away, referring to His ascension. They had spent the last three years or so by His side, being led by Him, being instructed by Him. All they had to do was listen, learn, obey, and follow. But all that would change after Jesus’ ascended into heaven. After that, they would graduate from the seminary, as it were. They would be the ones doing all the teaching and preaching. They would be the ones interpreting Scripture and explaining the will of God, explaining the things Jesus Himself had said—things which they often didn’t understand themselves while He was with them! And they would be doing it, not only among their fellow Israelites in their homeland of Israel, where people at least had a knowledge of the Old Testament and were awaiting the promised Messiah, but also in foreign lands, among the Gentiles, who had a completely different—and wrong!—understanding of who God is, who practiced a false and pagan religion. How on earth could they possibly take over this ministry if Jesus was going away?

I tell you the truth: It is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. Jesus promises His apostles a Helper, the Helper, whom He Himself would send to them after His ascension, a Helper who would take over for Jesus, in a sense, except that, instead of preaching to the world directly, as Jesus had done, the Helper would be working through the preaching and through the ministry of the apostles. The Helper, sent by Jesus, would be the One doing the actual building of the Holy Christian Church.

Let’s talk about the title “Helper,” since this is the first time we’re running into that name in our lectionary this year. It’s a word used only by the Apostle John, in his Gospel and in his first Epistle. In 1 John, he actually uses the word for Jesus, where it’s usually translated, “Advocate”: If anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous One. The imagery of the word is of someone who is called to your side to help you, to speak up for you, like an advocate or an attorney does in the courtroom, who counsels and encourages you, who advocates for you, someone who’s both by your side and on your side.

In heaven, we have an Advocate like that, as John says. Jesus is that Advocate. He died for our sins. And He rose again in order to justify before God all who believe in Him. He is also at the right hand of God, interceding for us before the Father. But here on earth, the One who speaks for us, the One who Advocates for us, the One who is on our side, is the Holy Spirit—the Spirit whom Jesus poured out on His apostles on the day of Pentecost. We’re going to be hearing more about the Spirit over the coming weeks. For now, we focus on the help Jesus promised in today’s Gospel.

He will show the world its fault concerning sin, and concerning righteousness, and concerning judgment. Concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to my Father and you will not see me any longer; concerning judgment, because the prince of this world is judged

He will show the world its fault. Other translations of that word are “convict” or “reprove” or “rebuke.” I like the simplicity of showing someone his fault. The Helper will show the world its fault, will show the world where the world (as in, the unbelieving world into which the apostles were being sent) is wrong, wrong in three specific ways.

He’ll show the world where it’s wrong concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. People are generally wrong about sin. They tend to think of sin as some terrible thing that other people do. They think they can engage in every kind of immorality, nastiness, violence, adultery, selfishness, etc., but it’s what “those other people are doing” that’s truly sinful. They think they get to define what sin is, and they think they can avoid having their sins charged to them if they do enough good things to outweigh the bad things. But the Helper will show the world where it’s wrong concerning sin, how God is the One who defines sin in His Word, how sin infects everything they do, and even who they are by nature. They’ll deny it, but the Spirit will not relent. He’ll show them where they’re wrong, and most of all, because they do not believe in Jesus. He’s the only One who wipes out sin. The one who repents of his sins and believes in Jesus has no sins counted against him, because he’s justified not by his own works but through faith in Christ Jesus. On the other hand, every human being who does not believe in Christ Jesus for the forgiveness of sins is and will be charged by God with sin. And as the Scripture says, the soul that sins shall die.

He’ll show the world where it’s wrong concerning righteousness, because I go to my Father and you will not see me any longer. People are generally wrong about righteousness. Most people tend to think of themselves as righteous people, at least righteous enough. They think that just about any actions they do are justified, because they have good reasons for the things they do, or because their feelings led them to it. How can their feelings be wrong? They think their righteousness before God is something they already have, or is something they can achieve. But the Helper shows them where they’re wrong. Jesus is mankind’s only Righteousness. We have none of our own. And He has gone to the Father; He has ascended into heaven. So man’s only access to righteousness, man’s only access to God is through the ministry that Jesus has left behind here on earth, the ministry of the Spirit, the ministry of the Gospel, where God has decided to bestow righteousness on us through Holy Baptism and through faith in His Son, where God has decided to grant us access to Him through Holy Communion, where the body and blood of His Son are truly present. You want righteousness? You can’t have it apart from Jesus, and that means, you can’t have it outside of His Holy Christian Church, where the ascended Christ has placed the ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Finally, He’ll show the world where it’s wrong concerning judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. People are worried about all sorts of things, but not nearly worried enough about God’s judgment. They think they’ll escape it. Many think it will never even happen. They’ve aligned themselves with this world and live for this world. But what they don’t realize, what the Helper reveals, is that the devil is the prince of this world, and that all who live for this world, will also die with this world, and will be punished eternally, together with the devil himself. The only hope of escaping the judgment that’s coming on the world is through repentance and faith in Christ, now, while there’s still time. People aren’t afraid enough of the day of judgment that’s coming. But the Helper will show them where they’re wrong.

But, as I said, He doesn’t do that directly, He does it through the preaching of the Word of God that the Church began to carry out on the day of Pentecost and has been carrying out ever since. It doesn’t mean that the world will accept the Spirit’s rebuke. For the most part, it won’t. Nevertheless, the rebuke must go out. And the Christian Church must and will continue to teach the truth concerning sin, and righteousness, and judgment, even if the preachers of the truth should be again as few as they were at the beginning, where only eleven men in that upper room with Jesus on Maundy Thursday were charged with bringing this truth to the world. Think about that, how impossible it would have been, except for the help of their Advocate, the Holy Spirit of God.

Jesus speaks in our Gospel of another way the Helper would help His apostles. Not only would He help them to preach to the world. He would also help them to understand the truth that had to be preached. When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. What an important promise that was! As we said, the disciples often didn’t understand the things Jesus taught them. How could they teach others? The Spirit, the Advocate, the Helper would guide them.

Now, this was, first and foremost, a promise made to the eleven apostles. They would form the foundation of the New Testament Church. Their teaching would dictate the doctrine that all Christians are to believe and confess until Jesus returns. So in their preaching and teaching, and, just as importantly, in their writings, they had the promise of divine guidance and inspiration from the Holy Spirit.

That’s why the true Church has always believed in the principle of Sola Scriptura, that Scripture alone—the inspired writings of the Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles—are the only source of Christian teaching and the only standard by which all other teachings must be judged. That’s why we reject any teachings that don’t have the inspired teaching of the apostles as their source.

But, as the apostle Peter promised, all baptized Christians would also receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, not to contradict the apostles, not to add teachings that the apostles never taught, but to grasp the meaning of the truth that the apostles left behind for us, guided as they were by the Holy Spirit.

Of course, as you know, Christians now exist in dozens of “denominations” and have broad disagreements about what that meaning is, when it comes to several articles of doctrine. Those disagreements never come from the Holy Spirit. He is always pointing toward the truth, and pointing, specifically, toward Jesus to glorify Him. No, all those disagreements always come from the outside, always come from the devil, trying to sow discord and false doctrine into the truth of the Holy Spirit, as men either refuse to believe, in context, the words as they are written, or insist on adding content of their own that isn’t derived from Scripture.

How can we deal with such a situation? How can we identify and cling to the truth? Only by relying on the help of our Advocate, the Holy Spirit of God, who has been given to us, too, as Jesus promised. We have diligently studied the words that the Spirit inspired, and also the witness of the Church from the beginning, and, by the Spirit’s help and guidance, we have come to know that which we believe, teach, and confess, and we’ve also identified many of the teachings that do not agree with the Scriptures, and, therefore, cannot come from the Spirit of God.

Still, it’s a daunting task, to confess the truth in a world that promotes so much that is false, to show the world where it’s wrong, when even many “Christian” churches insist that we’re wrong, to be a tiny little church, with a quiet little voice in the world. It feels very lonely at times. That’s why it’s essential that we cling to Jesus’ promise in today’s Gospel. Because He hasn’t left us alone in the world. He has given us an Advocate, to speak up for us, to guide, comfort, and encourage us—an invisible Advocate, yes, whose voice you can’t hear with your ears. But if you believe in the risen Lord Jesus, whom you can’t see, then believe also in the Advocate whom He promised to send. Our work in this world is simply to believe and to confess the truth that has been revealed to us in the Word of God. The Holy Spirt is the One who will work through it, as He sees fit, to glorify God in Christ, and to build His Holy Church. Amen.

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Hope for the sorrowful

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Sermon for Midweek of Easter 3

Lamentations 3:18-26

A little while and you will not see Me. And again a little while and you will see Me…You will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy. We heard on Sunday how Jesus prophesied to His beloved apostles the sorrow they would experience for a little while, followed by joy that would be far greater than the sorrow ever was and that would, at least eventually, be permanent.

Sorrow is nothing new for mankind. Sorrow is nothing new for the Christian. Since the Fall into Sin in the Garden of Eden, sorrow is part of the divinely pronounced curse on mankind. The final and complete remedy for sorrow will come when the risen Lord Jesus comes again. Until then, sorrow will still exist, and we learn from the words of the prophets and apostles, not how to escape it, but how to deal with it, and how to look beyond it.

Sorrow is something that the prophet Jeremiah knew all too well. He lived at one of the worst times a believer could ever live in, during the years leading up to and including the destruction of Jerusalem. He witnessed the nation of Israel, which, at that time, was synonymous with the Church of God on earth, utterly disintegrate from within—spiritually, politically, morally, and socially, and then he watched it fall to foreign invaders. And all the while he found himself in a very small minority of people who were still faithful to the God of Israel, while practically all his neighbors had turned away, and were tired of hearing his preaching. Even as I describe Jeremiah’s situation, it strikes me how similar it sounds to our situation today, as we live in the dying days of a republic, and, really, of the world.

And so we get into Jeremiah’s book of Lamentations, which includes three separate laments. The first two chapters are the lament of Jerusalem for herself, Jerusalem personified as a woman, as a virgin daughter who is being justly punished for the sins of her children. So Jerusalem’s lament isn’t a complaint. It’s simply a recognition of how badly things have gone for her because of her own sins and transgressions. She recounts all the disgrace and shame and ruin that she has suffered from unfaithful people within and from unbelieving Babylonians without. This is what it looks like to receive just punishment for one’s sins: utter devastation, being on the receiving end of mockery, abuse, and ridicule; homes in ruin; people literally starving in the streets; dead bodies everywhere.

But that was Jerusalem’s lament for herself, because her people, including her kings and priests, had abandoned the Lord God and turned to idolatry and “self-help” solutions, away from God and His Word. Jerusalem’s lament applies especially to those Christians who have actually abandoned the faith, who have become Christians in name only, or to those Christians who are suffering because of their own sins.

As for Jeremiah, his personal lament begins in chapter three, where our verses are taken from. Jeremiah had been a faithful prophet. He had not abandoned the ways of the Lord. He had not followed the people into idolatry or apostasy. And yet he, too, was suffering greatly. He, too, had to live through the fall of a nation, even though he wasn’t to blame for it, and in addition to that, he had to suffer shame and persecution for preaching the truth God sent him to preach. So his words apply especially to those Christians who are suffering, not directly because of their own sins, but because of the sins of others.

That doesn’t mean they’re sinless, or that they don’t deserve to suffer. The only sinless One who ever suffered was the Lord Jesus. No one’s heart is pure by nature. All people have earned eternal condemnation. But not all suffering and sorrow are punishment for sins. When we suffer because of the sins of others, we call it “discipline” or “testing.” And when we suffer for Christ’s sake, we call it “the cross.”

So it’s in that context of a believer in God, a child of God, being sorrowful and having to suffer for the sins of others, that our text begins. Jeremiah writes: And I said, “My strength and my hope Have perished from the LORD.” He said that after recounting, in the first 17 verses of chapter 3, the many ways in which the Lord had caused him to suffer. And, yes, even though it was the fault of the impenitent and unbelieving, it was still the Lord who caused Jeremiah to pass through it rather than rescue him from it. At the end of it, Jeremiah felt like he had no strength left, no hope left from the Lord. He was near despair, which is utter hopelessness. That’s how he felt.

But he also knew that what he felt wasn’t quite true (which is often the case!). If it were true, then there would be no point in going on, and certainly no point in praying. But he does go on to pray: Remember my affliction and roaming, the wormwood and the gall (that is, the bitterness I have had to endure). Remember! It’s not as if the Lord forgot anything. He isn’t capable of forgetting. The cry for the Lord to remember something is a cry for sympathy, a cry for compassion. Because, of all the attributes of the Lord, mercy or compassion is the one that is triggered by us, triggered by our wretchedness, or by our need and our inability to help ourselves in our need. Asking God to remember our neediness or our wretchedness is a way of asking Him to have mercy on us.

My soul still remembers and sinks within me. Jeremiah can’t forget the things he has been through. He remembers, and it still pains him, how the pagan Babylonians had ravaged the capital city of God’s kingdom, how his fellow Israelites laughed at him, rejected the word that God gave him to preach, and then persecuted him and threw him in a pit, and eventually dragged him off to Egypt instead of letting him live in peace under the Babylonians. He doesn’t deny the suffering he’s been through. He remembers, and his soul sinks.

But, again, he knows it’s not the whole story. This I recall to my mind, Therefore I have hope. Through the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness. This is the answer to sorrow. This is the remedy and that which restores hope, to recall to our minds the LORD’s mercies, the Lord’s compassions. Plural. Because it’s not just His attribute of being merciful and compassionate, which He is, but it’s all the many evidences of His mercy and compassion throughout history and throughout our lives. Those mercies are inexhaustible. They’re new every morning. Many of them have been recorded in Holy Scripture. Some of them we have witnessed here together at Emmanuel. And some of them you have individually seen in your own life, how the Lord has shown mercy to you, how He has upheld you in hard times and brought you through them in His faithfulness to His baptismal promise to you, to forgive you your sins, to save you, to be your God, and to work all things together for your good.

“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I hope in Him!” My “portion” is hard for us to grasp without understanding what a portion meant to an Old Testament Israelite. An Israelite’s portion was the piece of land in Israel, in the territory of the Promised Land, that each person or each family received as an inheritance. It belonged to no one else, only to that family. It was given to them by God as part of the inheritance He had promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, given through Moses and Joshua, for that family to live there forever. They had a claim to it. It was their most treasured possession. It was their heritage that they received and then passed on to the coming generations. Well, here Jeremiah speaks as the Psalmists often speak. He calls the LORD Yahweh His portion, which is like saying his treasure, the thing he treasures more than anything else in the world. He has the LORD as his own God, the God of his past, present, and future, the God who has promised that the sorrow will soon be replaced with everlasting joy. Therefore I will hope in Him!

Therefore you should hope in Him, too, because, in Holy Baptism, the same LORD gave Himself to you as your portion, as your heritage. You can call Him your own, even as He calls you His own beloved child. And if He is your true treasure, and if no one can take Him away from you, then even if you lose everything else, you still have your true treasure. And so you have reason to hope, and to rejoice.

The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, To the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly For the salvation of the LORD. Yes, a part of hope, by definition, is waiting. Waiting for the Lord to do what He has promised to do. Waiting for the sorrow to be turned into joy. Waiting is hard. Waiting quietly is perhaps even harder. But sometimes there’s nothing you can do about a problem, and waiting is all you can do. Well, it turns out that waiting is all you need to do. Waiting, and seeking the LORD while you wait for His help. Seeking Him in His Word and Sacraments. Seeking Him by seeking to walk according to commandments while you wait for His salvation to be revealed. You may have to wait a while, but remember what Jesus said in Sunday’s Gospel. It will only be “a little while.” And then you will see Him. And your heart will rejoice. Amen.

 

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The pattern of sorrow followed by joy

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Sermon for Easter 3 – Jubilate

1 Peter 2:11-20  +  John 16:16-23

We spent Holy Week listening to the apostle John recount Jesus’ words and deeds during that climactic week of His earthly ministry. Today we begin a series of five Sundays in the Church’s lectionary in which the same apostle walks us through some of Jesus’ final instructions to His apostles in the upper room in Jerusalem, before they set out for the Garden of Gethsemane. Some of the things He said applied to the immediate future, but mostly, He was preparing them for the time after His ascension, for those crucial decades when these men would be laying the foundation of the Christian Church, carrying the Gospel to the world, beginning with Jerusalem. It would be a trying time for them, with plenty of sorrow, so He encouraged them with the words of our Gospel. But He was also leaving behind words for St. John to record for our benefit so that we have the encouragement we need, in our time, to face the sorrowful times ahead, so that we, too, may have a reason to rejoice.

“A little while, and you will not see me. And again, a little while, and you will see me, because I am going to the Father.” They didn’t understand what He was talking about, and they were afraid to ask, so He goes on to explain, although still somewhat mysteriously. Jesus said to them, “You are asking one another about what I said, ‘A little while, and you will not see me. And again, a little while, and you will see me.’ Truly, truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy.

There is a fulfillment of these words in Jesus’ suffering and resurrection. Within a few hours, Jesus would be taken away from them, arrested, tried, tortured, convicted, crucified, and buried. During that time, Jesus’ disciples would be sorrowful. They would be sad, right up until the moment Jesus appeared to them again, in that same upper room, on Easter Sunday evening. Then they rejoiced when they saw the Lord, just as He said they would.

But on that evening, when Jesus talked about going away, He wasn’t mainly talking about going away to death and the grave. He was talking, as He said, about going away to His Father in heaven. He was talking about leaving the earth and ascending into heaven, after which they would never see Him again in this life. In a little while, that is, in 43 short days, they wouldn’t see Him anymore. And during that time, for the rest of their earthly lives, they would know many times of sorrow, as those men, one after the other, were persecuted and put to death for their preaching of Christ, and as they watched their brothers and sisters in Christ be tortured and killed for their faith, too. During that time, the world would rejoice, because the world would think it had gotten rid of Jesus for good, thought it would get away with doing as it pleased with the Christians who still live in the world.

And yet, Jesus says that, in a little while, His disciples would see Him, and that their sorrow would be turned into joy. The Easter fulfillment of that saying, when the sorrow of not seeing Jesus for a little while was replaced with great joy in seeing Him again, set a pattern for the future. It had another fulfillment, when they closed their eyes in the sleep of Christian death, and their souls were taken to Paradise, where they saw Jesus again after the sorrow of this life was done. And it will have another fulfillment, when Jesus returns at the end of the age, when all things reach their goal, and evil is destroyed, and death is swallowed up forever, when God will put an end to all sorrow and wipe away every tear from every believer’s eyes.

That’s three fulfillments of Jesus’ saying: at the time of Easter Sunday (for the original disciples), at the time of their earthly death, and at the end of the age which is still to come. But there is yet a fourth fulfillment of Jesus’ mysterious statement.

After Jesus’ ascension, the disciples didn’t see Him with their eyes, and they experienced sorrow, as we said. But by His Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit whom Jesus would pour out on His Church on the Day of Pentecost, Jesus enabled His apostles, and all of His believers, to “see Him” in another way, to see Him by faith, and to rejoice. By His Spirit, after they had experienced a little while of toil and sorrow—and near despair, as the apostle Paul describes it to the Corinthians—Jesus would fill them again with the assurance that their labor in the Lord was not in vain, that Christ really was reigning on His throne, that God was truly working all things together for their good. After they had experienced a little while of sorrow, Jesus would comfort them again by His Spirit, would testify to their hearts by His Spirit that they were beloved children of God, and so would enable them to rejoice.

We have an example of that in the apostles, after the Day of Pentecost. They were arrested by the Jews and beaten for preaching the Gospel of Christ. But as soon as they were released, it says that the apostles rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name. That’s not a manmade rejoicing. It’s the joy that Jesus gave them by His Spirit, teaching them a brand new way to view suffering—not as something to be feared, not as something to make them despair, but as something that is even cause for rejoicing.

The apostle Peter taught Christians the same lesson in chapter 1 of his first epistle: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

As Christians, you’ve surely experienced this strange mixture of joy and sorrow. At times the sorrow of feeling abandoned by God is stronger, while at other times the joy of knowing for certain in your heart that the Lord Jesus, who died for you, also rose again, and reigns at the right hand of God, and will never leave you or forsake you—that joy is renewed and strengthened. It’s all part of the pattern that Jesus spoke of in today’s Gospel, a pattern of sorrow followed by joy.

But they are not equal. There is not an equal amount of joy for the sorrow you go through. No, Jesus makes it clear that the joy is far greater. It weighs far more than the sorrow does. He compares it to childbirth in our Gospel—and how appropriate for Mother’s Day! There’s plenty of sorrow, plenty of pain, but in the end, the joy of bringing a child into the world is far, far greater than the sorrow ever was, as all moms will attest.

The pain and sorrow are, of course, a result of sin. Your sins, other people’s sins, the sinful condition of a world that is cursed. But this is why Jesus came, came into our sorrow, came to share in our pain, came to bear our sins, so that, by paying for our sins on the cross, and by defeating death in His glorious resurrection, He might break the pattern of sorrow followed by only more sorrow, the pattern of sorrow followed by only death, and create a new pattern. A pattern of sorrow followed by joy—true joy, joy in seeing Him now by faith, joy in the Paradise that believers will enter when we die, and the final, perfect joy of the resurrection at the end of the age.

You don’t need to see Jesus now, with your eyes, in order to experience this joy. The Lord is risen, whether you see Him or not. The Lord is risen, whether you experience the joy of it or not. And His promises remain true, even when you’re going through a time of sorrow. The Lord promises that, soon enough, you will see Him. And your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you. And as Peter also wrote, Though you have not seen Jesus, you love Him. Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, receiving the goal of your faith—the salvation of your souls. May these words, inspired by the Spirit of God, sustain you in all the times of sorrow you must still face in this life, and may they also grant you the sure hope of the joy that will most certainly come. Amen.

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The Shepherd Himself goes looking

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Sermon for Midweek of Easter 2

Ezekiel 34:11-16  +  John 10:1-10

You may have seen in the news that the papal conclave began today, the secretive process for choosing a new pope. The whole world is watching and waiting to see who the next pope will be, and what stances he’ll take, and whether he’ll rescue or further destroy Western Civilization. It’s somewhat ironic that it’s happening this week, as we hear the Scripture readings about Christ the Good Shepherd. Because, of course, the pope claims to be the Chief Shepherd over all Christians on earth, the head, not only of the Roman Catholic Church, but of the Holy Christian Church—as if the Church could have another head besides Christ, as if there could be another chief shepherd over the whole Church besides Christ. For that claim alone, Christians should recognize the papacy as an abomination. And no matter who sits in the chair that they falsely claim to be the chair of Peter, no matter who is chosen, the office of the pope will bring only destruction to Christ’s sheep within the Roman Church. It will only serve to scatter them and drive them away from their true Shepherd, the Lord Jesus Christ. Because, while there are surely many sheep of the Good Shepherd still within the Roman Catholic Church, the office of the papacy, by its very nature, seeks to lead them, not toward the Lord Jesus and His Word, but away from Him.

It’s uncannily similar to the situation of Old Testament Israel at the time of the prophet Ezekiel, who wrote during the early years of the Babylonian captivity. There was no single shepherd or king or prophet or priest who had tried to lead the people of Israel astray. No, but the kings and priests, as a whole, and many false prophets, had thoroughly abandoned the sheep and had become self-serving instead, using their positions to hold onto their power and their possessions. In the verses before the text you heard this evening, the Lord, through Ezekiel, berated those worthless shepherds of Israel, even as Jeremiah had done not long before, because those shepherds had not been working to preach the Word of God to the sheep, had not been seeking the lost, had not been preaching the Law to the secure sinners, or offering the comfort of the Gospel to the fearful and guilt-ridden sheep. They had not been pointing people ahead to the coming of the Messiah. Their ministry had become a business to them, a political role, an institutional position, not at all unlike the ministries that flood the Christian Church today, both in Rome and outside of Rome. Those worthless shepherds had so decimated the Church of Israel spiritually that God had to come in and decimate them politically, too, sending the Babylonians against them, sending Israel into captivity. The sheep, for their part, weren’t innocent in all of it, but the shepherds bore the greater guilt.

And so, with His flock scattered as far as Babylon, largely because of the unfaithfulness of the shepherds, the Lord announced His solution: ‘For thus says the Lord GOD: “Indeed I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out.

Much like the prophet Isaiah, as we saw during our Wednesday evening services last year, the prophet Ezekiel’s prophecies often have a double or a twofold fulfillment. God Himself would intervene in history, first, to bring His people Israel back from captivity in Babylon, back to the land of Israel. God Himself, through rulers whom He would raise up, like Cyrus and Darius and Nehemiah and Ezra, would resettle His people in their land. That was the first fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy.

But it was a minor fulfillment, a stop-gap fulfillment, because the sheep would just go back to their wandering ways, and the new shepherds who would arise in Israel would, for the most part, be just as bad as the old shepherds, so that, by the time of Jesus, God’s evaluation of Israel was that they were like “sheep without a shepherd.”

And so, about 575 years after Ezekiel prophesied, the Lord fulfilled this prophecy in the most direct and personal way possible. He didn’t go looking for His sheep through anyone else. He went looking Himself, in person. He sent His only-begotten Son, God, the Son of God, to Israel.

I’m going to reread the rest of the verses you heard from Ezekiel 34. And, while some things in the text have a first fulfillment in the return from Babylon, we’re going to focus on the second, bigger fulfillment at the time of Christ—and afterward! Listen again to the rest of the text:

As a shepherd seeks out his flock on the day he is among his scattered sheep, so will I seek out My sheep and deliver them from all the places where they were scattered on a cloudy and dark day. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land; I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, in the valleys and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them in good pasture, and their fold shall be on the high mountains of Israel. There they shall lie down in a good fold and feed in rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I will feed My flock, and I will make them lie down,” says the Lord GOD. “I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick;

Jesus did all of that during the course of His earthly ministry. He came, as He said, to seek and to save what was lost. He came calling the lost sheep to repentance and offering them a Father’s welcome back into the kingdom of God, to those who were willing to be carried back on Jesus’ shoulders. He fed them with the truth, with the Gospel, with God’s promise of forgiveness through Christ. He treated the broken and the sick, both physically and spiritually, and assured all who came to Him that He would give them eternal life and an eternal inheritance in the kingdom of God.

But notice what Ezekiel said the Lord would also do: but I will destroy the fat and the strong, and feed them in judgment. That’s what Jesus did with the scribes and Pharisees. He didn’t physically destroy them. He destroyed them with the sword of His mouth, with His word, as He exposed their hypocrisy, charged them with sin in the sight of God, and assured them that, in the sight of God, they stood already judged.

Ezekiel doesn’t touch on the other part of Christ’s shepherding in this text, how the Shepherd would lay down His life for the sheep, to make atonement for their sins. That was the awful price of their readmittance into God’s favor. But it’s also the very thing the Father sent the Good Shepherd to do, and He did it gladly and willingly for all who were and who would become His precious sheep.

Of course, in this Easter season, we focus less on the suffering and death of Christ and more on His mighty resurrection from the dead. In this Easter season, we focus on how the risen Lord Jesus continues to shepherd His flock through the ministry of the Word. Because it’s still Him doing it, even though He uses flawed and weak men as His mouthpieces. It’s the still the voice of the true Shepherd that you hear when you hear His Gospel purely preached, and His Word rightly explained, and when His words are spoken in connection with His Sacraments. It’s still the Lord God Himself, coming to His sheep who are still in the world, to seek the lost, to comfort the broken and the sick, and to gather His flock of Christians to Himself within His Holy Christian Church.

But there is still a third fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy, just as there was a third fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecies. Because, after Jesus is done gathering His sheep throughout the world, the LORD Himself will come again, in person, in glory, to gather His sheep on His right hand and to send all the others to His left.

And among those on His left will be all the false prophets who claimed to be the Chief Shepherd and the Holy Father of all Christians. They fooled many people here on earth, but they could never fool the Good Shepherd as they tried to steal His sheep from Him, nor, in the end, could they fool the true sheep of the Lord Jesus, because, as Jesus said in the Gospel, His sheep know the voice of their true Shepherd, and will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.

Always flee from the voice of the stranger, who presents you with an alternate gospel, and with doctrines of men instead of the teaching of God. You know your Shepherd’s voice. You’ve learned it from His Holy, inspired Scriptures. Keep listening. Keep following. And you can be confident that He knows and cares for each and every one of you, and will never let anyone snatch you from His hand. Amen.

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Called to follow the Good Shepherd

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Sermon for Easter 2 – Misericordias Domini

1 Peter 2:21-25  +  John 10:11-16

The second Sunday after Easter is traditionally celebrated as Good Shepherd Sunday because of the Gospel you heard from John 10. And it’s all the more fitting today as we celebrate a confirmation. Two confirmations, actually. Because what is it to be confirmed? What is it to be a Christian, for that matter, other than to follow the Good Shepherd, our Lord Jesus Christ, wherever He goes?

Now, following the Shepherd does not mean becoming the Shepherd. That’s impossible. There can be only one Good Shepherd. Only the Lord Jesus could stand up to the wolf on behalf of the sheep, could stand up to the devil and take him on and defeat him, and rescue the captives from his kingdom, and gather His sheep and tend to them as His own. Only the Lord Jesus could suffer and die for the sins of the world and take up His life again. Only the Lord Jesus could turn unbelieving, impenitent sinners into believing sheep, who belong to Him, and who live within the sheepfold of His Holy Christian Church. Only the Lord Jesus knew how to go looking for His sheep and find them and bring them safely home into the Father’s house. Only the Lord Jesus could give life to the sheep, eternal life that knows no end, eternal life that includes the resurrection from the dead at the Last Day. He alone will speak over the graves of His believing sheep and raise us to life again and bring us into the heavenly sheepfold. Only the Lord Jesus knows His sheep perfectly and is known by them. And they follow Him wherever He goes.

But what does it mean to follow Him? Saint Peter gives us some examples in today’s epistle. He writes, For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow in his steps. To this you were called. To what were you called? To follow the Lord Jesus Christ, to follow in His steps.

Now again, there are steps that Jesus walked that no one else can ever walk. He is the eternal, only-begotten Son of God, whose first step toward our salvation was taking on human flesh in the first place, choosing to become man, born of the Virgin Mary. That’s not a step any of us can take. He took on the office of the Christ, as our true Prophet, Priest and King, to save us from our sins. That’s not a step any of us can take. He came preaching and teaching in the name of His Father. That’s only a step we can take if He Himself calls us to do it, if He calls us through the call of the Church, as it calls ministers of Christ to minister in His name.

But there are steps Jesus took in which Christians can walk by the power of the Holy Spirit and are called to walk. The first step that Peter mentions is this: He knew no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth. Well, that certainly wasn’t the natural state in which any of us was born. We all know sin by nature. And in one way or another, we all practice deceit by nature. Whether it’s to keep ourselves from getting in trouble, or whether it’s to take advantage of our neighbor. All have sinned, says the apostle Paul, and fall short of the glory of God. Or, as John puts it in his first epistle, If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. Whereas in the case of Christ the Good Shepherd, He never knew sin. He never practiced deceit. Ever. From the moment He was conceived, He was sinless, unlike the rest of us. He had no sinful flesh. No sinful nature.

So you can’t follow the Good Shepherd by being sinless. But the greatest gift Christ has given us is the forgiveness of sins. God promises to forgive us our sins, for the sake of Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. When we look to Christ, in repentance and faith, He wipes our slate clean before God. But when He does that, He also gives us His Holy Spirit. And He creates within us a new man, a new nature, who is able, at least to some degree, to walk with the Spirit. To say no to sin. To say yes to righteousness. To walk in holiness, as those who have been set free from sin and set apart from the sinful world. To live no longer for sin, but for Him who died for us and rose again. And so, in this way, you are called to follow in the footsteps of your Good Shepherd. To live for God and not for yourself. To recognize the path of sin in your life, each and every day, and to avoid it. To walk a different way, to walk in the way of Jesus, with love for God above all things, and with love for your neighbor, and with a special love for your fellow Christian. Your love can never equal His love or match His love. But you can strive to imitate it, to follow in His steps.

Liam and Kaity, you have learned God’s commandments. And you’ve learned Luther’s explanations of them, too. You know how Jesus walked, and you know how He calls on you to walk. So follow Him. All of you Christians, follow Him in this way, shunning sin, and running toward God’s commandments. Not as a way to be saved from sin, not as a way to earn eternal life, but as a way to follow in the footsteps of Him whom you call your Lord, your Savior, and your Shepherd.

But your Shepherd did not only show you by His example how to avoid sin and how to serve God by doing what was right. He also showed you by His example how to suffer with courage. Now, suffering isn’t something you choose. It’s not something you go looking for. You suffer things that other people do to you. But Jesus assures His sheep that if the world persecuted Him, then the world will also persecute His believers. If the devil went after Him, he will most certainly go after those who follow Jesus.

When that happens, there are two questions you will have to answer. First, will you agree to suffer for Jesus sake, or will you run away from suffering in order to save yourself? To accept the suffering that the devil and the world will bring on you is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who willingly accepted the suffering that His Father ordained for Him, who drank that cup of suffering, for as much as He didn’t want to drink it. So to follow Him is to accept the suffering that goes along with being a Christian. To follow Him is to walk toward suffering, if that’s what faithfulness to God requires, to take up your cross and follow Him.

The second question you will have to answer, if you are willing to follow Jesus into suffering, is how you will respond to it. Peter writes, When he was insulted, he did not hurl insults in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but turned it over to the one who judges justly. When the world comes after you for speaking the truth, when people mock you, or insult you, or exclude you, or make life hard for you because you hold to God’s Word and you follow Jesus, you could do what so many people do. You could grumble. You could complain. You could hurl insults back at those who insult you. You could make fun of people, just like they make fun of you, or even threaten them. But, as Peter reminds us, that’s not how Jesus responded to suffering, is it? He took it patiently. He took it without complaint. He turned it over to His Father, who judges justly, and who will see to it that those who hurt His children will answer for it in due time. So if you would follow in the steps of your Shepherd, you will respond to suffering in the same way, turning it all over to God the Father, turning it all over to the risen Lord Jesus, who reigns at the Father’s right hand.

And why will you do all this? Why will you follow Jesus in avoiding sin, and doing what’s right, and speaking the truth? Why will you follow Jesus toward suffering and not away from it? Because you believe in Him, which means you believe what Peter wrote about Him, that He Himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, should live for righteousness. By his wounds you were healed. For you were like sheep going astray. But now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

Why will you follow in the steps of your Shepherd? Because all your steps were leading straight to hell, and would have led there, if the Shepherd hadn’t come in to face the wolf for you, if He hadn’t taken responsibility for your sins, if He hadn’t laid down His life for you, if He hadn’t called you by name to make you His own. But He did, and now you are. And so you love Him. And anyone who truly loves Jesus also wants to listen to Him, and to imitate Him, to be like Him, wants to follow Him, and does follow Him. See, He has shown you the way again today!

Liam and Kaity, you’ve been following Jesus ever since your baptism, and your parents have been guiding you by the hand along the way. But now you have learned more about what it means to follow Jesus and are about to confess, before God and before this congregation, your determination to follow Him for the rest of your lives, just as all the members here have, by the grace of God, made the same confession, and the same commitment. May God strengthen you by His Spirit, through His Word and through His Sacrament, to persevere in His grace and in your walk as Christians, to walk according to your calling to follow in the steps of the Good Shepherd all the days of your life, until you follow Him into the eternal life of His heavenly pasture. May the blessing once written to the Hebrews be upon you today, and upon all the Christians here: May the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you complete in every good work to do His will, working in you what is well pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

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The living Christ authorizes His ministers, like Thomas

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Sermon for Easter 1

1 John 5:4-10  +  John 20:19-31

The order of events on the first Easter Sunday is a little hard to pin down. Each Gospel writer was moved by the Holy Spirit to include certain details about that day, not always in order, but always with obvious excitement, even writing, as they were, several decades later, still so excited to share with the world some parts of the resurrection story. Matthew skips Jesus’ Easter appearance to His disciples entirely and takes us straight to His meeting with them on a mountain in Galilee some weeks later. Mark takes us to the table in the upper room where the eleven were gathered—the same table where they had celebrated Passover with Jesus and had received the Lord’s Supper from Jesus a few days earlier—and tells us how Jesus rebuked them for disbelieving the reports of those who had seen Him alive. Luke includes that story about the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, which we heard on Wednesday, and adds a little bit about Jesus eating a piece of broiled fish in front of the disciples, to prove that He was not just alive again, but alive with His own, real, human body made of flesh and blood.

For the apostle John, it had been nearly six decades between the resurrection and the time he wrote his Gospel, but the Holy Spirit still called to his mind certain details from that first Easter Sunday that no other Evangelist had recorded. And so we have this wonderful account of Thomas and his struggle to believe, and, as part of that account, a repetition of that special authority Jesus gave to His Church through the apostolic ministry to forgive or to retain sins in Jesus’ name.

First, let’s have a look at Thomas. Jesus appeared to ten of the twelve disciples on Easter evening, and, according to Luke’s account, it seems that other disciples were there with them, too. Judas was dead by suicide. Thomas was out and about. The doors were locked, for fear of the Jews, because, if they succeeded in killing Jesus Himself, why should they stop with Him? Why not go after the ones closest to Him, even as they had been planning on killing Lazarus, too? Worse, if God had not seen fit to rescue His beloved, sinless Son from the Jews, what hope did His disciples have left?

And then Jesus appeared in the middle of the room before their very eyes, just as He had disappeared before the very eyes of the two disciples in Emmaus, as soon as they recognized Him. Jesus had real flesh and blood and yet was able to appear and disappear at will, no longer submitting to the laws of nature as He had before. He doesn’t have to. He’s true God as well as true man, and does as He pleases.

He greeted His fearful disciples with a word of peace, and after a few minutes (and a few bites of food) they were convinced that it was really Him. And they rejoiced. And after a little while, Jesu disappeared again. Why didn’t He just wait for Thomas to get back? Because He wanted you and me to have this story, and to learn a lesson from it.

Thomas walked in the door a moment too late, and he wouldn’t believe his brother apostles, or the women who had reported seeing Jesus earlier that day, or the two who had come back from Emmaus. “Not unless I see the nail prints in His hands and put my fingers into them. Not unless I can thrust my hand into His pierced side. I know what I saw with my own eyes: a Jesus who was crucified, who died, who was pierced with a spear and whose blood came pouring out. You don’t come back from that. No one does. Human reason and experience say so.”

And the Lord allowed Thomas to stew in the unbelief that flowed from his human reason and experience for a whole week, until the following Sunday, and waited until Thomas was with them before appearing again. Peace to you, He said, and then turned and looked straight at Thomas, and held out His hands, still bearing the nail prints as a testimony to His suffering, and said, “Reach out your hand, Thomas, and put your fingers here. Take your hand, Thomas, and thrust it into My side, if you must. Whatever it takes. Be no longer unbelieving, but believing!” And Thomas said, “My Lord and my God!”

Yeah, he finally got it. The one whom he had been referring to as Lord for the last three years was also God. That’s why He could rise from the dead. Man can’t conquer death, but God can. And now Thomas knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man, Jesus, is the very God who has power over life and death.

With that in mind, consider the authority Jesus spoke upon His apostles on that first Easter Sunday. First, He breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit! The breathing on them was a picture of the Holy Spirit proceeding from His mouth like breath, the Spirit whom He, their Lord and their God, would send upon them 50 days from then, on the day of Pentecost. When the Spirit came upon them on that day, like breath from heaven, they were to remember this act of Jesus breathing on them and understand that it was Jesus, from the right hand of God, sending the Holy Spirit down upon His Church to begin the lengthy process of building it until He comes again.

And the tools for building it would be, not hammers, but keys. The keys of the kingdom of heaven. Keys that would be wielded with heaven’s own authority. Keys not made of metal, but keys made of words. As my Father has sent me, so I also send you…If you forgive the sins of any, their sins are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, their sins are retained. This is not a new command or authority. It’s the same one Jesus had spoken about months earlier. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. It’s the same command and authority recorded with different words by Mark: Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. It’s the same command and authority referred to in Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus told them that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And it’s the same command and authority that He gave them again on that mountain in Galilee, recorded in Matthew’s Gospel: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you. Jesus, as Lord and God, gave this command and authority to His Church, through the apostolic ministry, to preach the Gospel and to administer the Sacraments in the name of Jesus, who is both Lord and God. That’s how He would build His Church, through what we often refer to as the Means or the “tools” of Grace, wielded by the ministers whom He would continue to send until the end of the age.

Using the keys or the Means of Grace includes the speaking and the baptizing in the name of God that Peter did on the day of Pentecost, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins! It includes the appeal of St. Paul to the jailor in Philippi, Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved!, or as he summarized it to the Corinthians, Be reconciled to God! For God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. It includes the administration of the Lord’s Supper, too, where God’s forgiveness is handed out to God’s believing people, one by one. And it also includes, where necessary, the retaining of sins, as Peter did with Ananias and Sapphira, or with Simon the Sorcerer, or as Paul did with the sinner in Corinth who was flaunting his adultery. Whether it’s the forgiving of sins or the retaining of sins, Jesus set it up in His Church going forward that God would deal with men and build His kingdom through the keys wielded by the apostolic ministry of His Holy Christian Church.

A ministry that included men like Thomas, who had their moments of shameful unbelief. A ministry that included men like Peter, who had faltered before and would falter again, needing to be corrected by a minister like Paul, who had a previous reputation of locking Christians up in jail. A ministry that included also the Apostle John, who carried out his God-given ministry throughout the first century, of which this Gospel of John was a part. With the authority and with the inspiration of the Spirit that the Lord Jesus gave him, he wrote for us, not everything that Jesus ever said or did, but only the things the Spirit guided him to remember and to record, all for a purpose, which he states at the end of our reading: that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, by believing, you may have life in his name.

This is the same ministry, with the same Means of Grace, that has been passed on from generation to generation, so that the Church would always have the necessary, Spirit-filled tools for creating and preserving faith. This is the same ministry that is being carried out among you today, which you support, and which you are here making use of right now, according to Christ’s command. He never planned for any of you to see Him in this life, as the apostles did. What He did plan for was for you to hear His Word, to believe through what you hear, and to continue to receive the ministry of His Word and Sacraments, so that you might make it all the way through this earthly life, still hoping, still rejoicing, still believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, crucified and risen from the dead, and that, by believing, you, too, may have life in His name. May God grant it, for Jesus’ sake! Amen.

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Revealed in the preaching of His death and resurrection

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Sermon for the Week of Easter

Luke 24:13-35

What a wonderful story we have before us in the Gospel during this Easter week! What a beautiful scene St. Luke paints for us! Two downcast disciples of Jesus—not from among the eleven apostles but obviously sincere believers in Jesus who had spent considerable time with Jesus and the Eleven—walking sullenly down to the village of Emmaus. They had thought that Jesus was the Christ. They had thought that He would redeem Israel. But after seeing Him suffer and die two days earlier, rejected by the leaders of Israel, they thought they must’ve made a mistake. Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament Scriptures, could He?

Then Jesus comes out of nowhere, walking alongside them, and doesn’t allow them to recognize Him. Why? Why not just announce Himself and begin the Easter celebration? Because they needed a firmer foundation than their eyesight alone could provide. They needed to know the Christ from the Scriptures, and know Him better than they did, because what they knew about the Christ from the Scriptures up until now was far too vague and not nearly enough. They knew He would be a miracle-working Prophet. They knew He would redeem Israel. They knew He would reign on the throne of His father David forever. That was all true, but, again, it’s not nearly enough, which is obvious, because, according to their understanding, the Christ should not have suffered and died.

So Jesus, still not letting them recognize Him, rebukes them: Foolish men! You’re so slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Didn’t the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter into His glory? And then He patiently walked them through the whole Old Testament, showing them passage after passage that spoke of the suffering of the Christ.

Surely He pointed them to the very first promise of a Savior, given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, where God said to the devil, in his serpent-form: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. They probably focused on the “He will crush your head” part, without ever putting it together that the devil would also attack the woman’s Offspring, striking His heel, as a serpent strikes the heel of a man—a strike that can often be fatal, and in the case of the Christ, it was.

Then Jesus surely walked them through the events of Holy Week, maybe going through it all in order. Maybe He reminded them of Zechariah’s prophecy of the King riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Or maybe He began with another prophecy from Zechariah, prophesying Judas’ betrayal: “So they paid me thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said to me, ‘Throw it to the potter’—the handsome price at which they valued me!”

Then on to Maundy Thursday in the Garden of Gethsemane, He likely quoted Zechariah again, telling how all Jesus’ disciples would flee when the Christ was arrested: “Awake, sword, against my shepherd, against the man who is close to me! … Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.”

He could have continued with Psalm 109, where David prophesies the wicked and false accusations that were made against Jesus by the Jews: For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongues … In return for my love they accuse me. And Isaiah speaks of how they would commit violence against the Christ, and about He would respond to their attacks: I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.

But it wouldn’t be the Jews alone conspiring against the Christ. David had said in Psalm 2, Why do the nations rage, And the people plot a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying, “Let us break Their bonds in pieces And cast away Their cords from us.” And so the Jews got the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, involved, who also conspired with King Herod in Jesus’ trial, fulfilling this prophecy, even as the crowds cried out, Crucify Him! Crucify Him!, fulfilling a prophecy in Psalm 69, Those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head. And then Pilate condemned Him, even though, as Isaiah had said would happen, He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth…By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

As Jesus walked along with the two disciples, getting closer to Emmaus, He must have quoted extensively from Isaiah 52 and 53, where it says of the coming Christ: “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain … Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering … He was pierced for our transgressions … By his wounds we are healed … He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth.

Yes, He was wounded and “pierced,” as Psalm 22 said He would be. They pierce my hands and my feet. And they divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. Meanwhile, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, fulfilling another prophecy, He made intercession for the transgressors. And He was numbered with the transgressors, one hanging on a cross on His right and another on His left.

Maybe these two disciples on the road to Emmaus had been there on Good Friday to hear the chief priests and Pharisees mocking Jesus with almost the exact words from Psalm 22, where the Messiah lamented: I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All those who see Me ridicule Me; They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, “He trusted in the Lord, let Him rescue Him; Let Him deliver Him, since He delights in Him!”

You have to think that Jesus reminded the disciples of the words He cried out after three hours of intense suffering in darkness, words taken directly from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And when He said, “I thirst,” the soldiers fulfilled the prophecy from Psalm 69, They gave me vinegar for my thirst.

The death of Christ was specifically prophesied in several places. In Psalm 22: You have brought Me to the dust of death. In Isaiah: He was cut off from the land of the living… he poured out his life unto death. And in Daniel: After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing.”

Even after He died, the prophecies continued. When the soldiers found Jesus dead, they didn’t break His bones as they had done with the other two, fulfilling the Passover Lamb prophecy from Genesis, Not one of his bones will be broken. Instead, they pierced His side with a spear, fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy, “They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child.” And then, even in His burial in rich Joseph’s tomb, Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled: “He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death.”

But death would not be the end for the Christ. After His suffering and death, the prophecies continued from Psalm 22: For the LORD has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted One; nor has He hidden His face from Him; nut when He cried to Him, the LORD heard. Or Psalm 16, which Peter would later quote: For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption. You will show me the path of life. Or from Isaiah 53: After You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand.

All the while, as Jesus unfolded and decrypted the Scriptures for these two disciples, their hearts were burning within them. How could they have missed all these prophecies? They weren’t mistaken about Jesus being the Christ. On the contrary, the Christ had to suffer everything that Jesus suffered, in order to redeem Israel from sin, death, and the devil. And He also had to rise from the dead to “justify many” through His Gospel, and to build His kingdom, which would include both Jews and Gentiles, and to reign over God’s people forever. So, maybe the stories of His empty tomb this morning make sense! Maybe the tomb is empty, because Jesus is the Christ, who not only died, but has risen from the dead! Maybe His kingdom is just getting started!

And so it was. And so Jesus revealed Himself to those disciples at the dinner table. But only after revealing Himself to them first through the Word of God. That was always His plan. To build His Church through the Word of God, which came to include the eyewitness accounts of those who saw the risen Lord. So keep studying the Scriptures, and the Holy Spirit will continue to open your hearts, too, so that you see the Lord’s death and resurrection, as they were both foretold and fulfilled. This is how the Lord will comfort your hearts in every trouble, in every trial. This is how the living Christ will grow and extend His kingdom until the end of the age, through the preaching of His suffering, death, and resurrection. And you get to be a part of it! Amen.

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The empty tomb is peace for all who believe

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Sermon for Easter Sunday

1 Corinthians 5:6-8  +  Mark 16:1-8

Fellow believers in Christ crucified: The crucified One is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia! Praise the LORD!

When we say that Jesus lives, we don’t mean it figuratively. We don’t mean that He lives in our hearts, or in our memories. We mean that the real Son of God, who took on real flesh and blood, born of the virgin Mary, who truly suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, actually came back to life on the third day after His death, stepped out of His tomb, and, throughout that day and the coming days, appeared openly to all His disciples—who were glad, but surprised, to see Him.

It really shouldn’t have surprised them as much as it did. They had confessed Him to be the Christ, the Son of the living God. And He, the Christ, had told His disciples how He would be nailed to a cross, die, and rise on the third day, which was the very same thing that was prophesied about the Christ in the words of King David in Psalm 16 a thousand years before, “I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to the grave, or let your holy one see corruption.”

As the apostles pointed out to the Jewish crowds later on, King David, who wrote those words of Psalm 16, most certainly died and most certainly decayed in his grave. But the Holy One about whom he was writing, the Son of David, the Christ—He was not abandoned to the grave or left in the tomb. He was raised from the dead.

That’s what the angel announced to those wonderful, devoted women who went to the tomb that first Easter morning to serve Jesus one last time, to finish taking care of His body, which, they assumed, was already beginning to see corruption. They expected to have trouble rolling away the big stone that blocked the entrance, but, no, they saw that it had already been rolled away, and they saw an angel waiting there to give them the good news. Do not be afraid. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the One who was crucified. He has risen; He is not here. See the place where they laid Him!

Wouldn’t you like to have seen it, too? The place where they laid Him? The stone rolled away, the empty tomb, the neatly folded linens lying there, no longer wrapped around Jesus’ body, and the angel sitting where Jesus had been? Or what if you had seen the empty tomb? Then what? Then you would have been just as afraid, just as terrified as those women were. Because an empty tomb, all by itself, doesn’t calm anyone’s fears.

The fact that Jesus’ tomb was empty, the fact that the Son of David, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, has risen from the dead, is neither good news nor bad news, all by itself. It just is. It’s a fact. It happened. But what does it mean? Is it a fact that saves or is it a fact that damns? The only way to know what it means is to hear what God reveals about it in the preaching of the gospel.

And what does God reveal in the gospel about the Son of David, Jesus Christ, risen from the dead?

Well, in Psalm 2, a Psalm about the coming Christ, it says, Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and you perish in the way, for His wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in Him. So those who take refuge in the risen Son of God are blessed! But those who do not seek refuge in Him will be the objects of His wrath and will perish eternally.

According to the gospel, then, the empty tomb of Jesus means that His enemies and all who hate Him or His beloved Church had better be very afraid. The resurrection of Jesus is terrible news for the devil and his demons. It’s terrible news for the one who denies the existence of God, or who wants to get to heaven by serving some other god, or by offering God his own goodness and decency. It’s also terrible news for all who refuse to repent of their sins. Because if Jesus is dead, then you get to decide what’s right and wrong for your life, and then, when you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it. But if Jesus is alive, then everything He said is true, and there will also be a resurrection of all the dead and a Day of reckoning, for all. So for the impenitent and unbelieving, the empty tomb of Jesus is cause for fear.

But for those who want a sure refuge from God’s wrath, for those who wish to be reconciled to God through the death of Christ, for those who want Jesus for a Savior, the gospel reveals this truth: that Jesus was delivered up for our sins and raised to life for our justification. His death was sufficient payment for all sin, for every sin, for the worst sinner; and His resurrection means that all who hope in Him, all who trust in Him, all who look to Him for forgiveness of their sins are declared innocent before God’s own courtroom in heaven. The empty tomb means the justification of all who believe in the risen Lord Jesus.

And with justification comes every gift and benefit of Christ: the adoption as God’s children, the full acceptance into eternal life, the daily forgiveness of sins in this Christian Church, and the promise of your own empty tomb when Jesus returns with salvation for His waiting people.

But even those faithful women didn’t understand all that when they first arrived at the tomb on that first day of the week. Jesus’ empty tomb, all by itself, is still a scary thing, and those women remained afraid until, later that morning, they saw Jesus for themselves and, more importantly, heard His gospel, His word of peace. Then they rejoiced with a joy that nothing could ever take away.

You have to see Jesus for yourself, too. But not with your eyes. Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed, Jesus said. Believed what? Believed that the tomb of Jesus was and remains empty? Yes, but only if you believe in the One who stepped out of that tomb. Believe in God’s promise of forgiveness in Christ. Believe in His Gospel. Believe in the word of God the Father, who emptied Jesus’ tomb by raising His Son from the dead. This word from God that He has commissioned me to preach to you today is better than seeing a thousand empty tombs. Because here in the Word you don’t see the place where Jesus isn’t. You actually get to see Jesus in the only way that can save you from eternal death and grant you eternal life. Because here in the Word of God, here in the Sacrament of Christ’s Holy Supper, the risen Lord Jesus comes to you today with a message: “He who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” Those words would be utterly meaningless if Jesus had remained in the tomb. But He didn’t. So believe in Him who rose from the dead, because, for you who believe, the empty tomb of the crucified One means peace with God, and joy, and life everlasting. Amen.

Source: Sermons