Sermon Sunday September 28 2008

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Brothers and sisters,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
What was Jesus thinking in this story that we read from the Gospel lesson this morning? I mean here He is being confronted once again by the Sanhedrin who are questioning His authority; and asking Him by what authority He "does these things" and He doesn’t answer them. He could have blown them away. He could have made it rain and thunder, He could have given blind people their sight, He could have taken people’s sight away, He could have levitated the whole crowd. But instead He asks them a question about John’s baptism and says if they answer His question then He will answer theirs. Of course the Sanhedrin don’t answer Jesus’ question because they realize it will incriminate them, and so Jesus doesn’t answer them.
The elders and chief priests were wrong in ways that they didn’t realize. It’s easy to say "Well they just didn’t believe that Jesus had been sent by God the Father" or that they didn’t believe that He was the Son of God. And that may be true, but I think the fact that they were at least interested in knowing by whose authority He preached, and taught and spoke shows that they were at least somewhat open to the idea that He could have been from God. They were open to it in the sense that if He was they better recognize it for their own good.
But Jesus wasn’t going to cower to their demands. He wasn’t going to fit into their little box. And so He answers them through a parable, and in the process reveals to them just how wrong their thinking was. He tells them this parable of two sons who are told by the Father to go into the vineyard and work and the first son refuses and then later changes his mind. The second son says that he will concede to the Father’s demands but then does not. Jesus asks which of the two did the will of their Father and the chief priests and the elders say the first son.
And why not? Of course that is who they are going to say. After all it was the first son who went and did the work, even though he initially said he would not. But Jesus responds to the chief priests and elders by telling them that tax-collectors and prostitutes are going to the kingdom of God ahead of them.
And then Jesus reminds them that John the Baptist came to show them the way of righteousness and did not believe him but the tax-collectors and prostitutes did believe him. That was the difference between the two sons; one believed and the other one didn’t. The will of the Father for His children was not predicated by works but by faith.
And this is the Word that your Lord is coming to you with today; that the way of righteousness that our Lord called His disciples to through John the Baptist, and that the chief priests and the elders did not believe in and that He calls all of us to in baptism is not a way that we find our place on through our best, and most sincere and most purpose-driven efforts. What Jesus was telling those chief priests and elders and what He tells you today through the words of my mouth is that only through faith in Him do you find the way to righteousness.
And so that is why He said that the tax-collectors and prostitutes would get to the kingdom of God before the chief priests and elders. The tax-collectors and the prostitutes were righteous in their faith. They were righteous because unlike the chief-priests and the elders they were glaringly aware that they were sinners. They were reminded everyday that they were sinners, if not by their own conscience or guilt, probably by those around them. And so they repented, which means simply again that they acknowledged their sin. And so they repented and heard the call to the way of righteousness through faith in Christ Jesus.
For you see the Way that John the Baptist came to proclaim was not a step-by-step plan or process by which you could find your own eternity. No quite to the contrary John came proclaiming the law that exposes us bare and naked for the sinners that we are. John came to accuse us and point our sin to us and when we are finally driven to the point of despair and helplessness then he points us to Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
The way of righteousness that our Lord speaks of is not through our exalting ourselves but through the Lord Almighty humbling Himself, coming to us in human form as His Son. And He doesn’t just come to us as a human, but a human in the most humble of forms. He did not come to us triumphantly on a mountaintop but as a lowly infant in dingy and stinky barn in a dingy and stinky manger.
He comes to us, as we read in the lesson from Philippians and empties Himself and takes the form a slave. This is an amazing thing because it is exactly the opposite of how we naturally behave. We don’t seek to empty ourselves, that goes totally and completely against our nature. It is in our nature to be full of ourselves. We want to grasp onto every last piece of freewill that we can so we can cling to our mythological eternity projects.
We want to be recognized. We want to be in charge. We want status and we want others to know that we have status and treat us as though we did. We drop names to let other people know how important we are, always grasping for glory that doesn’t belong to us.
But our Lord Jesus is the opposite. He casts aside the glory and power that are His by right. He is the Son of God. He is God incarnate. He is God of God, light of light, true God of true God. Nobody deserves honor and glory more than Him. But He chose to become a man for you. He took the way of righteousness by casting aside the glory and honor that was due Him and choosing the path of grace, mercy, humility, poverty, obedience and death.
Now don’t get me wrong. He did not cast aside His divinity. When our Lord Jesus went through all pain, suffering, obedience and eventually death that He did for us, He was and is fully God, just as He had been throughout eternity. When He entered into the depths of our humanity He was fully God in fully human form enduring all of our pain, suffering, and death.
In doing this He leaves us no more room for our free-will. We work so hard to elevate ourselves but it’s all for naught. We seek glory and recognition that is built on deception, as we continue to try to fool ourselves with out mythological free-will.
But we are told in our Lord’s Word to have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus. We are told to follow Jesus’ suit and not grasp for what is going to suit and glorify us. We are told to follow Jesus’ example and empty ourselves and take the form of a slave.
But we can’t. Through our best efforts we can’t. On our best day we still fail so miserably that even our "good works" are riddled with sin. He entered into humanity and took on all the sin and ugliness we could throw at Him, until eventually He laid down His life for us.
And then He was raised from the dead and now He is exalted in glory, and now because He entered into the depravity of our sin and despair and took all our sin upon Himself, His glory is our glory. He took our sin and we received His glory, and it has been done, it is finished.
And the only way to grasp this glory is through faith. Through the humble obedience of our Lord Christ Jesus, sin and the devil have been defeated for you. Cast aside your illusions of free-will and merit and simply repent and believe upon the Lord Jesus as He calls, nurtures and sustains you in the faith that you received in the waters of baptism.
Empty yourself and hear the call of your Lord through His Word, nurturing and enhancing you in your faith by filling you with the mind of Christ giving you your true identity and purpose to empty yourself and taking the form of a slave for your neighbor. And in the midst of whatever assaults sin, the world and the devil hurl your way, you need not worry for through faith in the One who humbled Himself and became a slave for you have been exalted with Christ in front of God because that is the Father’s will.
Amen

Sermon Sunday September 21 2008

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Brothers and sisters,
grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
The question was posed this week when I went to text-study, and this is a paraphrase, but essentially the question posed was if the parable of the vineyard workers from this week’s Gospel lesson is true then why seek to be a faithful Christian? Why should we confess our faith or love our neighbor as ourselves or seek to feed and clothe the hungry if we don’t need to for our salvation?
If we can just be like those slackers who showed up at the eleventh hour to work in the vineyard and yet still received the same pay and the same reward as those who had worked all day, then why bother? If we can just live a life of selfishness and repent and confess on our deathbed and still be welcomed into our Lord’s eternal kingdom, just as much as someone who has served the Lord their entire life, then why bother?
Why would we want to work for something when we don’t need to? And yet still we try to earn that which we can’t. Still we try to take credit for that which can only come to us, not from our best and most pious and sincere efforts, but from outside of us, as a gift of God’s grace. And so in doing this, we look around and we see our neighbors maybe aren’t working as hard as we are, or not getting up as early as we are, or not giving as much as we are and we become like Jonah grumbling against the heathen Ninevites or that first group of laborers in the vineyard grumbling to the landowner about those slackers who showed up so much later than they did,
We look around at our neighbors and rather than loving and serving them the way that we are called to, we ignore them, or reject them. We hold onto grudges tighter than we would hold onto the last remaining piece of food during a famine. All one has to do is watch the news and hear all the talk of how the economy is in a shambles, and four dollars a gallon for gas would suggest that it is, and see how many different targets there are for finger-pointing in connection to the economy to see how much we love to grumble against the slackers.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up where we see this in the election; where one candidate’s attempt to besmirch the name of the other candidate, will the next day become the other candidate’s opportunity to haughtily exalt themself above their opponent all so they can say "See how they attack me."
All of this is a reflection of our inborn tendency to resist allowing God to be God. We love to sing that favorite old children’s hymn "He’s got the whole world in His hands" but when push comes to shove, we don’t really believe it, certainly not the whole world. You see as baptized believers in Christ, we talk a good game about grace but we have a really hard time accepting just how radical our Lord’s grace really is. We’re okay with God extending His grace and mercy to us, but when we see our Lord getting, what we perceive to be a little too loosey-goosey, maybe a little careless with that whole mercy and forgiveness thing, then we want Him to reign it in a little bit.
We think surely God must see the same faults, sins, and blunders in our neighbors that we see, and yet He doesn’t seem to be holding those against them. We expect the Almighty God and creator of the universe to bow to the standards and whims of His own creation. We demand that our Lord be brought to order and that He prescribe to our standards, so as to make sure that He condemns those whom we see as deserving of His condemnation.
But if ever the old adage, ‘Be careful what you wish for’ applied, it applies here, because if our Lord ever did start relating to us through any means other than His pure and radical grace, we would all be lost and condemned. For with every condemning thought against our neighbor, or every act of self-righteous indignation, or every mere angry thought we simply show ourselves to be bound to the very same sin that we love to point out in our neighbor. If God did prescribe to our standards of what is fair, just, and appropriate, we would be doomed for eternity.
But today in the Gospel lesson, our Lord comes to us with a radically different Word and He flips our standards of fairness and justice completely upside-down. Today in His Word our Lord comes to us and reminds us that try we as might, we cannot fit Him into our standards of fairness and justice.
We thought we Had Him once. We thought we had Him bound to our standards of fairness and justice, when we bound Him to a cross. But three days later, with the rolling away of the stone, He showed that He would not be bound to the grave. He showed that just when we thought we had Him, He was simply doing what He chose with what belongs to Him. He showed that what we thought was the demise of our Lord was actually the demise of our sin as He bore the wages of our sin by taking our sin upon Himself and laying down His life for us on the cross, and now we belong to Him.
And so from this we know that the work of the Lord Jesus, the Word incarnate bears fruit with or without us. His Word does bear fruit and so we see it bearing fruit today as our Lord comes once again in the waters of baptism claiming yet another laborer for His vineyard, as He has claimed all of us, and marked all of us with the Cross of Christ; the mark that try as we might we cannot erase from our head. We may try to erase it with our little schemes and projects, as the devil slings his arrows at us.
But the Word that is spoken over us in baptism, continues to come after us, just as the landowner continued to go out after workers for his vineyard. And so all we can do is simply believe; believe our Lord when He tells us that we are forgiven, believe our Lord when He tells us that we are His, believe our Lord when He tells us that He is gracious and merciful and slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
And so being grasped by the faith that we receive in baptism we go forth and work. We hear and respond to the calling of our Lord to confess our faith to our neighbor, to love and serve our neighbor, to feed and clothe the hungry and naked, to visit the lonely, to raise our children in the faith and expose them to God’s Word and the confessions and to bring them, with you, to the Lord’s house for worship, and do whatever else the Spirit leads you to do as the One who claims you in baptism does with you as He will.
And we do this not to receive kudos from our Lord, we do this because, as St Paul reminds us in the lesson from Philippians, we have been granted the privilege not only of believing in Christ but of suffering for Him as well. Indeed we have been freed to follow Paul’s lead and simply acknowledge that our Lord works in ways that we often don’t see, so we can stop looking and actually trust our Lord who promises that all things work for the good of those who love Him, and start hearing and listening to what our Lord is saying. Stop focusing on the old that is being done away with and start listening to the new that He is bringing forth in His Word and sacrament.
You are among the heathen who have come in at the eleventh hour to receive God’s grace. You are God’s own and He has done with you what He wants by showering you in His radical grace, mercy, and forgiveness. And what He wants is for all of His people to come to a saving knowledge of the truth, and so here today you once again have had that very saving knowledge in the Gospel of our Lord proclaimed to you, and soon you will come forward once again and receive the forgiveness of your sins in the body and blood of your Lord Jesus in His supper, and so when you leave today remember that you have been branded with the cross of Christ, and filled with the fruit of the vineyard, that your neighbor, be they a fellow-worker in the vineyard or not; you leave here with the fruit of the Gospel that your neighbor needs and that the Lord promises to produce in you.
Amen

Sermon Sunday September 14 2008

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Brothers and sisters,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Peter asks Jesus how many times should he forgive his brother when he sins against him. Peter suggests what he probably thought was a pretty gracious figure; seven times. And when you think about it, why wouldn’t he have thought that was a gracious figure? As human beings, we’re big on giving second chances. In fact, there is a saying that goes "Everyone deserves a second chance."
A second chance, yes; but we tend to think that if we are anymore gracious than that then we run the risk of allowing someone to walk all over us. In fact, I believe there is also a saying that says "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."
But the answer that our Lord Jesus gives to Peter is one that would fly in the face of such a self-focused world view. Indeed Peter’s suggestion of forgiving someone seven times would no doubt have seemed very gracious to him, and I am sure it would seem overly gracious to some today. But Jesus answers Peter in a way that shows that Peter clearly just isn’t getting it, even if his suggestion does show more grace than Peter’s contemporaries would have been willing to show. Peter’s problem was not that he had the wrong amount, but that he thought such a thing as how much our Lord calls us to forgive a repentant sinner, could be calculated.
One could probably speculate that Joseph from the Old Testament lesson might have asked a similar question. Joseph might have wondered, with everything that his brothers had put him through, in all the ways that they sinned against him, does he have to forgive them all at once for the wrongs that they did, or can he forgive them some of it but still hold a grudge for some of the things that were harder to forgive? And really, considering that his brothers tried kill him but then sold him into slavery, but told their father Jacob that Joseph had died, who could blame Joseph for possibly holding onto some grudges?
And as the Old Testament lesson opens, it appears that Joseph’s brothers feared that Joseph would choose to hold onto some grudges. They seem to suspect that Joseph might have been just holding out and waiting for his father to die before he tried to settle the score with his brothers. Joseph’s grudge had a long time to simmer in his heart.
Joseph’s brothers probably wouldn’t have been surprised, and they probably would have felt it would have been perfectly just, for Joseph to act like the slave in the parable that Jesus recounts for the disciples; the slave who after having been completely forgiven of the debt that he owed the king, was not able to do likewise for someone who owed him a fraction of the amount that he had owed the king.
That is how we work. We all just naturally think in the same way as that slave. We are not naturally inclined toward love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness. We are naturally inclined to get what is ours. We are naturally inclined toward getting what we think we have coming to us. If anything it is thought of as a sign of weakness to show grace, mercy, and forgiveness in our culture.
I think that is why television shows like Law and Order and CSI are so popular; because they operate on a fairly simple premise. Somebody is hurt or even killed by someone else. Experts in various fields of investigation, depending on the show, gather evidence, they find out who is responsible for the crime, and the person pays for the crime. It is a simple formula, and we like it, because there is not a lot of room for mercy and grace in those shows. For 60 minutes while we watch these shows we are allowed to judge, and belittle, and scorn, and exalt ourselves above the dastardly perpetrator of whatever fictional crime they happen to be investigating that week.
And I believe that is a reflection of our human relationships. Too often our human relationships are boiled down simply to a matter of settling accounts. We spend too much time focusing on how we believe that we have been wronged and how we can make it right. And the more we do this, the more we become curved in toward ourselves. And it is not just limited to when we believe we have been wronged. It also affects how we behave when we are the one who has wronged someone else.
When grace, mercy, and forgiveness are taken off the table in our human relationships then all that is left is trying to figure out how to even the score. And when you are the person who has sinned against someone, and we have all been in that group and probably put ourselves there every day in one way or another, then the only recourse is to fear the inevitable backlash for your actions or to simply live in denial of the destructive nature of our sin.
But again, when how we relate to each other is merely a matter of settling scores then we just remain curved in toward ourselves. But we are not called to be curved in toward ourselves, for when are then we run the risk of forgetting where we stand before God. What this means is that failing to forgive as we have been forgiven by our Lord does not merely affect our human relationships it affects our relationship with our Lord. And in the parable we can see the result of failing to forgive when the unforgiving slave was handed over to be tortured until his entire debt was paid. And Jesus tells us in His Word that His Heavenly Father will do the same to us if we fail to forgive our brother or sister from our heart.
And so we go back to Joseph and we can see that Joseph was a man who knew where he stood with God. Joseph was a man who understood that for all God’s people, not only is grace and forgiveness a part of how our Lord relates to us but rather our relationship with our Lord is defined by grace and forgiveness. That is why Joseph was able to forgive his brothers for everything that they had done to him. And when Joseph explained to his brothers that what they had intended to harm Joseph, God had intended for good, he showed that, like Paul writing in the lesson from Romans today, Joseph understood that whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord’s.
And as abundant and everflowing as the love of God must have seemed to Joseph, it was merely a reflection of what was still to come. Joseph had no doubt seen and experienced God’s amazing grace, but it was a glimpse of how our Lord would reveal that amazing love, grace, mercy, and compassion for all God’s people to see.
Once you realize the extravagance of God’s forgiveness through the death and resurrection of Jesus, then you have no room in your heart for grudges. Just as it was Joseph’s desire to forgive his brothers, forgiveness of your neighbor becomes something you desire when you truly know the joy of forgiveness that comes in the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.
His brothers begged him for forgiveness, but there was no need, because Joseph’s response shows that any grudge that he held toward his brothers had long since been let go. And so it should be for you. In the waters of baptism you were claimed by your Lord Christ Jesus and marked with His cross which declares to the world that whether you live or whether you die, you are the Lord’s.
This does not mean of course that we are to forget our sins. We are never to forget that we are sinners and that it is for our sins that Christ Jesus laid down His life. And it is exactly to that promise and refuge of Christ that we run when the law condemns us of our sin. And so no matter what the devil throws at us; our Lord comes to us everyday in His Word, accusing us with the law, exposing us for the sinners that we are, driving us to our knees in confession and repentance, but then lifting us up in grace, mercy, and forgiveness with the sweet Gospel of the abundant and extravagant love shown us in the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus.
And just as with Joseph, that is how forgiveness springs from the heart to the lips to merciful action toward your neighbor. Jesus’ response to Peter’s question of how many times we are to forgive our brother was "seventy-seven times." Of course he didn’t literally mean 77, he meant our call to forgive is limitless. It is limitless because the forgiveness we receive is limitless in that we are in a constant state of confession and forgiveness. We are constantly receiving the forgiveness of our Lord in Word and sacrament, and in that the forgiveness that our Lord demands of us is brought forth in our words and actions toward each other and our neighbor.
Amen

Sermon Sunday September 7 2008

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Brothers and sisters,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
This morning in our Gospel lesson our Lord tells us of the greatest gift that we as disciples of Christ have for the world, for our community, for our neighbor. And what I am referring to is nothing short of the opportunity and the privilege that we, as forgiven sinners have to literally share Jesus with those around us; to share the Gospel, or specifically in the case of this week’s Gospel lesson, the opportunity and privilege, and obligation to declare the forgiveness of sin.
And indeed this is a great gift and privilege and obligation, for it speaks to the very heart of what the Gospel is all about; the forgiveness of our sin; the great promise that on the cross, Christ Jesus bore the burden of our sin, death and punishment. And we have the privilege of being able to share this with our neighbor. And at the end of the day, that a gift far more precious and valuable than anything else that we could give to our neighbor, for as Luther reminds us in the catechism, we are saved not by gold and silver but by the holy and precious blood of our Lord Jesus, and He calls us and frees us to share this precious gift of forgiveness with our neighbor.
So why do we resist this call? Why do we resist this call to share the forgiveness of the Lord Jesus with our neighbor, when it is such a wonderful gift? In the catechism this is called the Office of the Keys and is described as the authority which Christ gave to His church to forgive the sins of those who repent and to declare to those who do not repent that their sins are not forgiven. He didn’t just give it to the apostles, He didn’t just give it to bishops, He didn’t just give it to pastors. Our Lord Jesus gave the authority to declare the forgiveness of sins in His name to His church. Why do we resist this calling.
We get a clue as to why we reject this as much as we do from three words contained in the description from the Office of the Keys. The three words??? "Those who repent." We are called and sent to declare the forgiveness of sin in Christ’s name to those who repent, those who acknowledge their sin and turn from it. You see, in order to declare someone forgiven of sin, they have to be aware that they are a sinner, and that is a difficult thing to tell someone. It is difficult to point out somebody’s sin to them.
But we are called to do just that. Our Lord gives us the Office of the Keys for a reason. He wants us to use it, and so in today’s Gospel lesson, He helps us out. He shows us how it is that we, the church can live out or calling to declare the forgiveness of sin to our neighbor.
He tells you first that if someone sins against you, you are to show that person their fault when you are alone, just one on one. If you listen you have regained them. But if they don’t listen then you take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen then you tell the church and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, then you are to let such a one be to you as a tax-collector and a Gentile. In other words, at that point, if the offender refuses to listen to you, then to a few of you, then to the church, then you are to reject them, or excommunicate them. In other words, this would be an example of when we withhold forgiveness.
And that is why we resist and run from our calling to utilize the Office of the Keys. We are afraid that it will get to that point. We are afraid to hold people accountable for their own sin because we fear that they will reject us or take it personal. We are afraid that it will get messy. And it can, and does.
But we don’t do anybody any favors by trying to save them from being offended. In fact, often trying to save someone from being offended may mean allowing them to mire in their sin, and there is not greater disservice that we could do to anyone. We need to remember, when we run from this calling, we are denying someone the gift of the Gospel.
Luther wrote of the Gospel and how it relates to God’s calling to the church…
We shall now return to the Gospel, which offers council and help against sin in more than one way, for God is surpassingly rich in his grace: First, through the spoken word, by which the forgiveness of sin (the peculiar function of the Gospel) is preached to the whole world; second,5 through Baptism; third, through the holy Sacrament of the Altar; fourth, through the power of the keys; and finally, through the mutual conversation and consolation of brethren. Matt. 18:20, "Where two or three are gathered," etc.6
For the most part, we are ok with the first three; preaching, baptism, and Holy Communion, but it’s those last two; the Office of the Keys and bringing the Gospel to our neighbor through mutual conversation and consolation, that we have trouble with. It’s those last two that we tend to run from, and we do so because they are messy.
Oh we may try to convince ourselves that we are acting out of love by saying things like "Who am I to judge?" or "I am no better than them." or "I’ll just make them upset or offend them." But the truth is, it’s not out of love that we avoid holding each other accountable for our sin. It’s out of fear; fear of the unknown; fear of how the person might react; fear of putting yourself in a situation you can’t control.
There is a television show that I sometimes watch called Intervention. It is a reality-based show where in each episode you see a family planning to stage an intervention for one of their own who is struggling with addiction or alcoholism. At the end of the episode you see the intervention which is where they will unsuspectingly bring the person who is struggling with addiction or alcoholism to a place where there will be a group of their closest family and friends. One by one the family and friends will tell the addict or alcoholic how their actions, their mistakes, their sin has affected them.
And quite often, through the whole episode the addict or alcoholic will be in denial, but when they start hearing how their actions and decisions have hurt and offended their family, how the burden of alcoholism or addiction has become a burden on their family and friends also, that is when the breakthrough finally comes. That is when the walls finally come down and the person finally admits that they need help, and quite often it’s a very powerful and moving moment. But it would not have happened if the people who loved and cared for this person had not loved and cared for them enough to be open and honest with them about their sin, and be willing to risk getting messy.
The final authority in this process of repentance and forgiveness that our Lord lays out for us is the congregation. What this tells us is that, when it comes to the Christian witness, there is no higher authority in the land than the individual Christian congregation. But when we refuse to live out our calling to bind and loose sins then we essentially relinquish that authority, for when we do that we relinquish our ability to address the greatest need there is; and that is the world’s need of the Gospel.
Confronting people with their sin is challenging and messy and it does involve giving up control. And because of that, our Lord has attached a wonderful promise to this that where two three are gathered in His name He is there among them. He has freed us from having to worry about the messiness.
Our Lord Jesus bound our sin to Himself when He went to the cross and loosed it in the grave where it remains. And when He walked out of the tomb three days later His disciples saw that He was who He said He was; the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and this glorious Gospel message of forgiveness and new life was proclaimed and passed on to the generations and it wouldn’t have happened if our Lord Jesus were not there among those gathered in His name. And so here we are, baptized in His name and gathered in His name in Word and sacrament and He is among us, and He will come to us in His bodily presence again in a few minutes in the Lord’s Supper, and so we have three of those five elements of the church that Luther spoke of. And when you leave here those last two of binding and loosing sin and consolation of the brethren go with you. But our Lord is there among you at all times, perhaps especially when it gets messy.
Amen

Srmon-Sunday August 31 2008

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Brothers and sisters,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I, like I am sure many of you, have spent some time this past week watching the Democratic National Convention. And next week I will spend some time watching the Republican National Convention. I have noticed this week that politicians are pretty skilled at the fine art of exaggeration. Barack Obama’s campaign approach, as is common for the presidential candidate from the non-incumbent party, has been to emphasize the need for change. "Change we can believe in" has been his campaign slogan. And indeed there is some genuine need for change. But to listen to some of the speeches this week, one would think that America, as a nation was on the verge of collapse, and our only hope is Barack Obama, when the reality is in the grand scheme of things we are the richest country in the world. And of course this week the Republicans will do the same thing and they will present John McCain as the one who can save us.
And I am not belittling the issues that the conventions address. The issues they are addressing such as healthcare, social security, the war, the economy, national security etc are all of course very valid and essential. And indeed there were some very powerful and poignant examples of people struggling with these issues that were mentioned at the convention this past week. But overall I found a lot of the language and a lot of the hoopla and hype connected to the convention to be reflective of a culture mired in the very condition that our Lord Jesus sees in Peter when Peter dared to rebuke Jesus for telling Peter that He (Jesus) was going to have to undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and be killed and raised on the third day. This is to say that often, our culture, we, set our minds too much, and place too much value on and hope in human things and not nearly enough on divine things.
And it is that condition and that state that our Lord Jesus addresses when He says that those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for His sake will gain it and then poses the question of what it profits anyone to gain the whole world but forfeit their life. Imagine if the very disciples whom Jesus was speaking to could see the world that we live in today, with the greater access to food and necessities, health care, living accommodations, entertainment options etc. We live in luxury that would have been unimaginable to them. They would no doubt say that we have gained the whole world.
And yet because, like Peter, we are so focused on things of the world we want more. You see Peter’s objection is rooted in his limited and cultural understanding of Jesus. You’ll remember in last week’s Gospel lesson Peter showed that he and his fellow disciples had a much better understanding of who Jesus is than their contemporaries who confused Jesus for John the Baptist, Elijah and a prophet, when Peter boldly confessed his belief, on behalf of he and the rest of the disciples, that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of the living God.
But in this week’s Gospel lesson we see Peter, not long at all after his bold confession of faith, already messing up again. We see that, in spite of the fact that he might have been far ahead of some of his contemporaries when it came to his understanding of who Jesus is, Peter still had a long way to go. He was trapped and bogged down by his human understanding of who Jesus is, which told him that the Messiah shouldn’t have to be killed.
Which of course it is true that Jesus didn’t have to be killed. He could have allowed us to mire in our sin and suffer the due punishment which we all deserve. But He didn’t. Instead He laid down His life for us; taking upon Himself our sin and shame and bearing the punishment we deserve. But notice this is not the level upon which Jesus responds to Peter’s rebuke. In other words, He does not respond by getting into a theological debate with Peter.
You see Jesus knows that at the heart of Peter’s rebuke lies not a concern over right doctrine, but rather that Peter fears that if suffering and death await Jesus then perhaps a similar fate awaits Peter. Peter gave up everything to follow Jesus, but to give up his life? But that is exactly what our Lord Jesus demands of us, to give up our lives for His sake.
Focused on human things, we look for solutions to our problems and challenges and fulfillment for our needs and desires in the creation and not the Creator. But the more tightly we cling to the creation and our earthly life the more we close ourselves off from the Creator such as we see from Jeremiah in the Old Testament lesson.
And so in our self-absorption and greed we also lose sight of the joy and sweetness of God’s Holy Word and His eternal promise. We focus so much on saving our temporary earthly lives and thus oppose Christ’s perspective of giving up our lives for His sake that we forget the great gift of eternal life that awaits us. But just as Jeremiah was called to turn back to God so our Lord calls us back to Him and turns us back to Him.
God’s Word tells us that the message of the cross is foolishness and a stumbling block for those who are perishing, and when we focus on human things, like Peter we show our inherent offense to Christ’s perspective and the message of the cross. But by our Lord Jesus’ reaction to Peter’s rebuke we see that He is offended by that which opposes the cross. In spite of how offensive it might have been to Peter, Jesus was speaking Gospel to Peter. Peter rebukes Jesus, and Jesus’ response reveals that this wasn’t just about Peter’s offense at the Gospel but about the devil’s attempts to cast doubt on Jesus and the Gospel when Jesus says to Peter "Get behind me Satan."
Jesus provides the life and forgiveness we need, but we set ourselves against Him and on a path which leads only to the grave that by ourselves we can’t get ourselves off of. We can’t, but our Father in heaven can and did when He sent His Son to lay down His life for us. And that is what He is revealing to the very disciples who oppose Him when He tells them that He must suffer and die and rise from the dead for them.
And just as Jeremiah was called back to faith, Peter was called back to the faith that he had just boldly confessed when our Lord Jesus demanded the removal of the very one who was diverting Peter away from that faith when He said "Get behind me Satan."
Jesus didn’t get into a theological debate with Peter because he knew that ultimately Peter was not so much diverting himself away from the truth but rather sin and the devil were and Jesus would not stand for it. As I said, Peter was focused on human things, and this just made him that much more susceptible to the lies of sin and the devil, as it does to us today.
But our Lord Jesus did not allow Peter and nor does He allow us to remain stumbling blocks. And so like He did for Peter when He called Peter behind Him as a follower of Jesus, so He does for us today through Word and sacrament, calling us to our rightful place behind our Lord Jesus as His followers.
In Jesus’ death and resurrection we are transformed from stumbling blocks to saints and we are given new life as His followers, so we no longer have to try to save our lives. Of course in 21st century North America generally this does not mean that we literally lay down our lives to follow Jesus. But He does call us to let go of those human things that our culture embraces and stay focused on Him.
But understand that He does not demand that we do this but rather He frees us to do this. In Jesus’ death and resurrection we are given new eternal life so we no longer need to focus on saving our temporary earthly life. We are free to lose our life for His sake by, as it says in the lesson from Romans, blessing those who persecute us, contributing to the needs of the saints, extending hospitality to strangers, living in harmony with one another, refusing to pay evil for evil, and just overall living out our Lord’s call to follow Him by loving and serving our neighbor in Word and deed; the very Word of our Lord that Jeremiah describes as precious and by which we serve our Lord’s mouth.
And in doing this, we find our very Lord making us whole, making us whom we were created and saved to be and preparing us for or place in His eternal kingdom. And that is a promise, unlike perhaps many of the promises you heard from the convention last week and the one to come this week, that you can always count on.
Amen

Sunday, August 24 2008

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Brothers and sisters
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Today you are confronted with a question that gets right to the heart of what it means to call yourself a disciple of Christ. And this question is of course the question that Jesus confronts the disciples with when He asks them who people say that He is. And the answers that the disciples give indicate a real lack of understanding of who Jesus is, not necessarily among the disciples mind you but among their contemporaries on whose behalf they are speaking. The disciples report that some say that Jesus is John the Baptist, some say Elijah, some say Jeremiah or one of the prophets.
And so upon reading this morning’s Gospel lesson perhaps you find yourself wondering how they could have been so wrong about Jesus. Maybe you even think that "Well certainly we don’t find that sort of confusion today." There are nearly 2 billion people on the planet who profess to be believers in Jesus Christ. I think it’s very likely that among that many self-professed Christians there are going to be some pretty different views on the person of Jesus.
Just here in the US you have countless denominations. You have televangelists who try to figure out a way to fit Jesus into their un-biblical vision of America as the nation most blessed by God. You have leaders of national Christian church-bodies who will present their ideas of helpful legislation to presidential candidates, as prophetic, as if when Jesus told us to go out and feed the hungry and clothe the naked He meant we should do it through legislation. And there are Christian "academic scholars" who seem committed to chipping away at the image of Jesus that we read about in God’s Word.
All of these are examples of trying to understand and define Christ Jesus according to human wisdom. It’s something that we are all guilty of everyday. Maybe our examples aren’t as obvious as some of the ones that I mentioned, but they are still there. Through the daily greed and anger and lust and every other sinful thought, feeling and desire that we give into we show that we are just as capable as anyone of trying to define Jesus according to human logic and wisdom and even weakness. And when we do that we show that we are afflicted with the same weakness that the contemporaries of the disciples and often the disciples themselves struggled with.
For you see the question of who Jesus is is one that ultimately we can’t answer on our own. Left to our own devices we are not able to see Christ Jesus for who He really is. And so we find ourselves reducing Jesus to being a moral teacher, or a prophet, or a great teacher. Or we find other ways to try to fit Jesus into our box of reason and logic, going so far perhaps to even exploit His holy name in order to push an agenda, political or otherwise.
But in this Gospel lesson we can see that our Lord is at work revealing Himself to us, and drawing us into the faith that He calls us to and demands of us. After the disciples told Jesus of all the false notions that the contemporaries of the disciples had, Jesus then responds to this by asking all of the disciples and not just Peter, as some would tell you who they say that He is. And Peter, speaking on behalf of all the disciples rightly says to Jesus "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."
Peter’s confession is nothing short of miraculous. We’re all familiar with so many of the other miracles that took place during Jesus’ ministry; the feeding of the 5000, turning water into wine at the wedding in Canaa, all the healings and exorcisms. and as impressive and glorious as all of those are, Peter’s confession of faith, and for that matter anybody’s confession of Christ Jesus as the Son of the living God and the Messiah and the Savior, anybody’s confession of that, including yours is miraculous.
It is miraculous because it is a confession that human, sinful minds could never declare without the Holy Spirit. Jesus Himself confirms this when He responds to Peter’s confession by declaring to Peter that he is blessed because the confession of Christ Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of the living God that came from Peter’s mouth did not come from flesh and blood but was revealed to him by Jesus’ Father in heaven. Sin and the devil want nothing more than to prevent you from making this confession of faith.
And it is for that reason that our Lord saw fit to send His Son Christ Jesus the Word incarnate, to live the perfect life, death, and resurrection for us. In Christ Jesus our Lord does not just tell us who He is, He shows us who He is, and that He loves us so much that He would take our sin upon Himself and die for our sin so that we might be forgiven, and be raised so that we might receive eternal life. And through the Holy Spirit coming to us in Word and sacrament, we are called to believe this and confess this.
And when our Lord Jesus says to Peter "…and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it." The Rock He is referring to is not Peter himself but the truth that Peter had just confessed; the truth that Christ Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of the living God. In other words, the church is built upon the disciples of Christ, past, present, and future, so this includes you, boldly preaching, teaching and confessing the name of Christ. And He continually comes to you in Word and sacrament to fill you with the faith do just this in the face of the attacks of sin and the devil.
And sin and the devil will and do attack. Sin and the devil try to tear down the Church that is built upon the confession of Christ Jesus as the Messiah and Son of the living God. And one of the primary means that this is done is by attacking the very confession of faith that we are called to bring to the world.
Most of you probably remember that in the days immediately following the 9-11 attacks government officials and commentators alike were quick to point out that our nation’s fight was not with Muslims in general but with fundamentalists and extremists. And so how did they define a fundamentalist or an extremist? The popular definition became one who holds that his or her religion is right and thus that other religions are false. I don’t know about you but this would qualify me as a fundamentalist or extremist.
In fact anyone who would say that they agree with the confession that Peter made in today’s Gospel lesson would qualify as a fundamentalist or extremist by that definition. For Peter did not merely confess Jesus to be a messiah, but the Messiah; and he did not confess Him to be a son, but the Son, and he confessed Him to be not the Son of a god, but the Son of the living God. It’s important to recognize that Peter said living God because that would have stood in direct opposition to the multitude of false, dead, idols that were so present back then, and today stands in opposition to the dead idols of money, power, ego, sin, false idols and yes false religions that are out there.
So we live in a culture that tolerates Christianity but if we dare to confess our faith in Christ with the boldness that Peter did then the world labels us extremist and fundamentalist, and this of course is nothing but sin and the devil attacking the church built upon Christ Jesus.
But again our Lord Jesus promises that not even the gates of hell will prevail against His church. And so we can listen boldly to the words of the apostle Paul in the lesson from Romans where our Lord tells us not to conform to the ways of a world that rejects the truth of Christ Jesus as the One and only Savior and redeemer, which of course is nothing but sin and the devil attacking the church built upon Christ Jesus.
It is true that we live in a culture that is hostile to the Christian witness, but there are many confessors of the faith who have worse it than us, and certainly the disciples and apostles faced rejection the likes of which we couldn’t imagine. This does not mean that the reality of a culture hostile to the Christian witness should not be taken seriously. Of course it should and we can look to how our Lord has sustained those bold confessors who came before us all through the years and those who are with us today proclaiming the Christian witness in lands where doing so in places where doing so is not only rejected but could have you killed.
But Paul reminds us that we are all one body, those of us here today, those who have gone before us and those who will come after us. And the same renewing of minds in our Lord’s Word that sustained the disciples and early-church fathers, even in the face of death sustains us in the face of those who would label us extremist and fundamentalist.
Amen