A look at hours. . .

It occurs to me that the business of hour in Scripture has caused no shortage of complaint and confusion.  So when we speak of creation, we get the conundrum of what it means when it says God created in days when it might be said that our definition of a day does not come until at least after the first day.  But as interesting as this is, it is slightly amusing.  How positively impotent of God to create a day without the sun and moon!  Surely it is swatting at gnats to question the use of day here while swallowing the elephant of God making all things from nothing.

There is another aspect of day which clearly is not referencing the mere passage of hours or minutes.  That is the Messianic Day.  Our Lord announces this hour.  He also announces when it is not.  In John 2:4 Jesus insists His hour has not yet come.  Jesus is not complaining about a scheduling issue with the urging of the Blessed Virgin who says They have no wine.  The hour of which our Lord speaks is the Messianic Hour.  So when Jesus then says in John 12 that the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified, He is again not referring to a timing issue counted in minutes.  The hour which our Lord is addressing is the hour of His death of which Holy Thursday is the prelude.  Likewise in John 17, Jesus announces the hour not so that we might check our watches or even calendars but look to behold the work of God that fulfills the promise of the prophecy of Eden and the promise of the prophets through the ages.  Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son that He may glorify You.  This is not an hour with minutes but with meaning for all the minutes of creation.  Everything looks to this time and this event.

Curiously, the hours of our suffering and pain are always counted in minutes.  That is because they have an end.  Just like our lives are counted in years, months, days, and minutes -- we have an end.  But what God does to save us happens in time but is without limit.  The Messianic Hour has become our time now by baptism and faith.  We are no longer captive to the present just as we are not imprisoned by our past.  We have the future God has appointed and it is ours now by faith and soon face to face.  We have already passed from death to life (John 5) though we have this day in part and will have it completely on the day God has appointed.  We endure the sufferings of this life but they have an hour, an end.  We rejoice in the life that God has appointed without suffering and without end.  This ought to be a matter of some hope and joy for us.  All of these thoughts happen to me on my preparation for preaching on Epiphany 2 in the one year series.

If you do not know who you are. . .

One of the things at issue within the whole gender identity debate is the significance of not knowing who you are. Knowing who you are certainly includes knowing if you are male or female but it also extends from this knowing who created you and what sin has done to taint God's good creation.  In determining who is to be baptized, one of the things required is that the person or the family bringing the child to the waters of baptism confess God's good creation, sin's corruption of that which God has deemed very good, of the life of repentance and catechesis that flows from this baptism, and of the shape of God's godly order for the individual within that creation (vocation).

No one receives baptism as God's stamp of approval over you and who you are and what you have done.  No one.  Not heterosexuals nor homosexuals and not those who think they fit somewhere in between the binary shape now so despised today.  Baptism is the killing of the sinful self and the birth of the new person, created in Christ Jesus, for faith, good works that glorify God, and for everlasting life.  We are born anew -- new people rising up from the baptismal waters -- not to give approval or blessing upon what was but in order that everything we are or intend is made new.

If you do not know who you are or if those presenting you to be baptized do not know this, where do we go from here?  Do we proceed with the baptism presuming that something magical will happen apart from the faith confessed and growth in faith of those baptized?  Or do we stop at that moment to catechize in preparation for baptism?  I am sure that I am not alone as a pastor who has been asked by a grandparent to secretly baptize a grandchild because the parents are not believers or someone who wants the privileges of baptism but cannot quite bring themselves to believe the Word of the Lord or live in captivity to its truth.  But baptism is not a magical act which lives without the rest of the command to teach all that I have commanded you.  Nor is baptism the end of negotiation and compromise until we believe that God respects where we are coming from and we are able to receive His blessing without such life of repentance.

Baptism is, at least at first, the acknowledgement of who we are.  We are sinners -- not simply because we have deliberately or actually sinned in thought, word, and deed, but also because we were born into sin.  We are not asking God to participate in our sin or condone it or celebrate it.  We are offering it to the Lord so that He may forgive our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  That includes our confusion over who we are and our disordered desires as well as desires that are rightly ordered but evil and our confusion over what is good and right and salutary.  We confess it all -- the good that we have done and the good left undone.  To stand before baptism is to admit our need for what baptism offers and God promises.  Without this, what good is that baptism except as mere symbol and sign without any power to affect who we are or how then we live?

Baptism is not the reward for the righteous but the gift to the sinner.  Therefore, we teach and confess that all sinners are welcome to receive baptism -- if they are willing to admit their sin and need or the family bringing them to the waters of baptism is.  Further, all sinners are welcome to receive baptism -- if they acknowledge that the work of baptism is done by the Spirit and not by the baptized -- including the faith that receives and rejoices in what baptism does.  And all sinners are welcome to receive baptism -- with the promise that they will work to turn from the ways of sin and evil and seek with all their heart, mind, body, and soul to  follow the Lord Jesus Christ in newness of life.  If those with gender confusion are neither willing nor ready to admit their sin or hear the call to repentance or heed the call to follow, what good is it to seek or to receive baptism?  Perhaps those who have no intention of turning from their sin, repenting and having faith in Jesus Christ do not wish to be baptized anyway but if they show up, the least we can do is to be faithful to them and to everyone who seeks to be baptized or to have their children baptized.  We must speak the Word in love to them and to all who come seeking baptism.

A few thoughts on the university. . .

How easy it is to presume that if the education is good, the work of the university is done.  Whether Christian or Lutheran or not, that is a fallacy that corrupts the educational process more often than not.  It is not simply about the goodness of the education received but it must also be about the moral values that accompany that education and the person you are becoming through that education.

I have probably written too harshly of the state of affairs for Christian and Lutheran colleges and universities.  There are those who have taken me to task insisting that the education offered by such institutions is actually quite good.  For that matter, I am not disputing whether or not the education is good but what I am concerned about is the religion that accompanies it.  You can get a good education many places and some of them a lot cheaper and more cost effective than a private religious school.  While we should not sacrifice academics for the sake of religion, neither should we presume that if we offer a good education our job is done.  

For many folks, the education received at such institutions either directly operated by the churches or church affiliated is probably pretty good. If it is not, someone has some explaining to do and perhaps a refund might be in the offing.  But with that education is to come religion -- or else it is not a religious school.  We do the Church a disservice and we fail at our intended task if we fail to nurture the faith of those who come from devout and Christian homes (and especially Lutheran ones).  We dishonor the congregations and families whose sacrifices established and still fund those educational institutions if we offer them a good education but neglect the spiritual welfare of those who teach and learn in those institutions.  

I do not believe that education must be practical in order to be good -- as a dinosaur I still believe in the classical liberal arts education in which we are taught to think and to reason -- especially under the tutelage of the Scriptures.  I do not believe it helps if we disdain the education in favor of what is eminently practical -- how to earn a living -- but which does not illuminate the mind.  At the same time, I do not believe that we are doing anyone a favor by offering on a religious university campus the option of obtaining a largely secular education.  Devoid of the values and truth of our faith, why would we bother with such a costly and difficult enterprise as collegiate education unless we were willing to match the education of the state school with an even better one which reflects what we believe, teach, and confess right down to the core?  So by all means we must give them a good education but we cannot afford to give them one empty of the values, tenets, and teachings of the faith or we are wasting the valuable resources of time and money the Church needs for other tasks.  

We should not ask our people to sacrifice their education in order to obtain the doctrine and piety of the faith but neither should we offer those not of the faith a decent education without also imparting to them the doctrine and piety of the faith.  This is not simply about colleges and universities (indeed, the whole reason for the parochial school lies within this same context) but it is no less about such institutions of higher learning than it is about the preschools, elementary schools, and high schools of our churches.

Something often lost. . .

Nuance is often lost in discussions and seldom preserved in record.  This is especially true when it comes to the evangelistic mission of the Church.  Let me illustrate.  Some time ago in a meeting of Lutheran pastors, there was a discussion about whether we are bringing people to Jesus or bringing them to the Church -- it was no small debate.  There were those who complained that all this attention to making the people members of a local congregation obscured the overall vision of bringing them to Christ.  On the other hand, there were those, me included, who complained that it was impossible to bring people to Christ without connecting them to where Christ is, dispensing His gifts through the means of grace.  I regret that few minds were changed and the question was left hanging amid the disagreement.

Some time later, well, a couple of years later on Trinity Sunday to be exact, I had an epiphany while we confessed the Athanasian Creed.  The particular part of the creed is the beginning.

Whoever desires to be saved must, above all, hold the catholic faith.
Whoever does not keep it whole and undefiled will without doubt perish eternally.
And the catholic faith is this,
     that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.

The point of the evangelistic work of the Church is not simply to address the individual with the Word of the Lord through which the Spirit works but to order them rightly before God -- so they may worship the Lord -- joining in the baptized who gather in the name of the Lord, absolved of their sins, catechized by the Word preached, and fed and nourished upon the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist.  The creed connects what we so easily disconnect and therefore lose -- the connection between faith and worship.  Orthodoxy and orthopraxy always go hand in hand or something is wrong.  Or, to put it in older terminology, lex orandi, lex credendi.  Theology must sing (so said Norman Nagel).  Doctrine and our belief in that doctrine do not live in the imaginary world of intention or even in theory.  They live in the real world of worship, prayer, and service.  It is, to borrow Luther's phrase, so that we might thank, praise, serve, and obey the Lord that He brings us into faith and into the lively fellowship of those who believe.  To put it bluntly, it is impossible to bring someone to Jesus without also bringing them to the Church where Jesus is worshiped and wherein He serves His people with the gifts of His obedient life, life-giving death, and victorious resurrection.

Salvation was never such an individual pursuit or gift that it neglected the fullness of the Church's life around the Word and Sacraments here and now nor was it ever meant to bestow a relationship which was singular and not communal.  Perhaps this is why we have such trouble understanding how God worked with Israel, the role of the remnant, and the mercy of the Lord in general.  The nuance lost is that somehow you can bring someone to Jesus while that same person remains a stranger to the place where His name is invoked in prayer, His water washes clean, His voice absolves, His Word speaks and accomplishes what it says, and His food feeds soul and body to everlasting life.  If we as Lutherans cannot get this right, we have gotten something very important wrong.

The drift of sin. . .

Though it certainly does happen, the ship moves off course more by a slow and almost imperceptible drift.  It becomes greater as the time elapses until the drift can no longer be ignored.  It is not a small deviation from the course but a radical departure from the direction intended.  No one in the wheel house has to turn the rudder all that much to end up wandering completely off course.  Drift begins in small twists and turns until it becomes a major problem to correct course and return to your intended path.  The errors in life and in the Church come less from radical departures from the truth as much as they happen through drift and slow turns away from the course.

Sin manifests itself less with sudden and abrupt evils as much as it comes through the common human tendency to wander away or gradually drift off course. It is that way for the life of the Church as a whole and it is that way for those who are members of her.  Who wakes up one morning suddenly rejecting God or what congregation all of a sudden departs from orthodox truth and confession?  Instead, it happens so gradually that no one notices until someone awakens to warn of how far they have drifted.  A person raised in the faith and well catechized does not often decide to reject the faith but they drift away one Sunday, one service, one Bible study, one devotional reading, and one prayer at a time.  The person simply stops paying attention to the services missed until they are no longer missed and absence becomes the norm.  It is true of Bible reading, the fellowship life of the congregation, and prayer.  Sure, when life comes crashing down, they pray and may even show up in worship but it is no longer familiar.  The once familiar has become strange and difficult -- just like when a ship finds it has drifted way off course and now must radically shift its direction to get back.  It is a lot of work and part of the people wonder if the rewards will be worth learning it all over again

I do not recall many who have left the Church in a huff over some great conflict but most folks simply drift away or wander off.  The vast majority of folks cannot point to a particular event when they left the Church or departed the faith.  In fact, most of them would insist that they have not departed the faith.  Most of them could not even identify how long they have been gone because in their minds it does not seem so long ago.  In the same way, we stop practicing the faith and do not notice how long it has been until we have trouble recalling the words to the Our Father or the Creed.  Maybe they moved and never connected to a new congregation or maybe something in their life consumed them long enough until they became a stranger to God's House and His Word.

The thing is that as easy as it is to drift or wander away, to return is harder than you can imagine.  Ask any pastor who has tried to contact and converse with those who were once regulars and have now disappeared from the life of the Church.  It is a monumental task both for the Church and for the people to restore those lost.  It is a long term process with few promises of a happy result.  This is surely what it means for the heart to become hardened and calloused to the things of God.  We do not see or realize the distance growing between us and God and us and His Church but that itself is a hardness that is so difficult to break through.  Finally, we begin to think we never really were on that former path at all -- we second guess our believing and our piety until we justify the course change and call it a course correction.  That is when the hardness is complete.  We did not miss is but when we saw what we had missed we decided it was not worth missing.

This is why it is easier to gain new members than to recover the old ones who have drifted away or wandered far from the way.  If you are a layman reading this, think about this before you jump on the pastor or others for failing to win back those who departed.  If you are a pastor reading this, admit both how hard it is and how long a process to win back those who have left.  For all of us, however, it is a warning that the longer the folks drift, the more likely it will be they will never correct course and return.  This is also true from churches who depart from creed and confession.  The little deviations long ago reap their reward in the radical departures accepted as normal and even right today.  This is also one of the reasons that new denominations are formed instead old ones restored to their orthodox and Christian confession and teaching.  Yet we must all be sad by the fact that all of these work against both the consistency of the Church's faithful confession and the growth in numbers for the Kingdom.  We may not be able to do anything about turning around the dismal statistics common to most Christian churches today but we should at least do this -- make sure that our churches remain true to creed and confession.  The day will come when people will not abide sound teaching but that is never an excuse to give up the sound teaching.  In the same way, for those who do course correct and return, if there is no orthodox confession to return to, what will they have gained?

Just in case you have forgotten him. . .

While every Christian squirms as Pope Francis tries to play friends with the world and ends up making everyone alternately angry or relieved, there was a time when a serious theologian was Bishop of Rome.  While Lutherans may not have liked everything about Benedict XVI, we learned to appreciate his gravitas and his love of Scripture.  In one of the more prescient things Joseph Ratzinger ever said, he looked around at the present and toward the future and left us this:

′′Soon we will have priests reduced to the role of social worker and message of faith reduced to political vision.  Everything will seem lost, but at the right time, at the most dramatic stage of crisis, the Church will be reborn.  It will be smaller, poorer, almost catacumbal, but also more holy. For it will no longer be the Church of those who seek to please the world, but the Church of the faithful to God and His eternal law.  The rebirth will be the work of a small, seemingly insignificant yet indomitable break, past a purification process.  Because this is how God works. Against evil, a small pack resists."

It is always the remnant that brings the faith to bear against the masses.  It always was that way in Israel of old and it has been that way through the ages and it will continue to be that way.  The Church has constantly been tempted as Jesus was -- to bow down to the devil of the day in order to achieve their dreams of relevance and popularity.  The cheap and easy path to glory was not the way of Jesus and it cannot be the way of those who follow Him.

I am sad to see the grand church buildings of old closed or sold or left to ruin.  They represented the sacrifices of generations who believed it was worth it.  But if they are merely empty monuments to the past and without the people who gather in the presence of the Most High God, they are of little use to us now.  What is of greater consequence are those who once gathered but no more.  Perhaps Covid has done us all a favor by allowing those who were not of Christ an excuse to depart the pretense.  In any case, I remain tearfully sad at those who once graced the pews and lifted their voices and knelt in prayer and reception of the Sacrament but do so no more.  I live with the deep regret of those who have become occasional Christians, together in the Lord's House when it is convenient or when it costs them nothing of their vaunted safety, security, comfort, and pleasures.  Quite literally, it is the greatest of my own personal failings as a pastor that many departed under my watch.  I continue to think of and pray for them.  But the reality is most are gone, never to return again.  Yet without the company of voices confessing together and the gifts of God bestowed in Word and Sacrament, their faith will be hard to sustain.  The world and the devil will see to it.

So maybe we are, as BXVI wrote, a small pack.  But for twelve the world might not have heard the Gospel or the lands around the Mediterranean converted within a century or the hoards of pagans washed in baptismal water or the world cast against the bright light of Christ.  We may not be as many as we were once or as we wished we were now but we are enough -- enough for the Lord to do His bidding.  Rather than shed our tears for the earthly power and influence that now lives only in our past, we should struggle and strive to make sure we remain of the household of faith, that our earthly homes are places where Christ lives in faith and devotion, and our earthly lives continue the good works that purchase none of the cost of our salvation but serve the neighbor and are noticed and rewarded by God.  That will be enough.  

Curiously, bishops all over the Roman Catholic Church are rushing to close church buildings -- not only because some of them are empty but because they are stretching priestly resources so very thin.  They say that the majority of all churches in America have less than 70 folks in them.  Before we would lament their smallness, remember that nearly every one of the congregations of Christendom were even smaller while Roman emperors were persecuting the illegal faith and the Word of the Lord grew (to borrow Franzmann's wonderful phrase).  It will grow still.  Not because we will it or because we have programs to make it happen but solely because of His promise that His Word shall not return to Him empty handed but will accomplish its purpose for being sent.  If that was true, it still is.  Because this is how God works.

In the golden age of our glory, we set up colleges and universities and parachurch organizations to accomplish all kinds of wonderful things.  Now our institutions of higher education are pale imitations of the secular schools with which they compete and our parachurch organizations are shopping for a market bigger than our dwindling numbers.  Some of these may well outlive the church bodies that established them as they morph into agencies for anyone who needs their products and away from their exclusive role as servants of the servants of the Church.  That is how it will be.  But the Church will go on.  In the ruins of our once mighty operating empires, the cross is still raised and Christ still lives and the Kingdom casts off every blow of the devil trying to kill it.  If that is what it takes to survive, then we will do it and survive as God wills.  How we wish it were not so, but that is how it is.  Rome has a joke of a pope in place of a real theologian and that is the sad state of affairs for many church bodies.  Do you miss him yet?  I do.  We need confident voices to tell us that the shadows of our past may well be the temptations of the present and the undoing of the future.  Put not your trust in earthly rulers or kingdoms or churches that borrow from them.  Take up your cross and follow Jesus.

Baptism now saves you. . .

Sermon for the Baptism of Our Lord (B), preached on Sunday, January 7, 2024.

As  the Catechism teaches us, baptism works in us the forgiveness of sins, rescues us from death and the devil, and bestows eternal salvation on all who believe this – as the words and promises of God declare.  The Catechism makes it plain that this is not simply the judgment of Luther or of anyone else but what Scripture teaches.  Mark records it.  “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved.”  Paul says it in so many different places.  Titus 3:  “[God] saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by His grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.”  Or from Galatians 3: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”  Or what we heard read in Romans 6.  Or the passage that makes it so simple a child gets it:  “Baptism now saves you.”  

We are not guilty of ignoring what God says about baptism as some might be but that does not mean we are not guilty.  We treat baptism as if it were child’s play – a toy or image but not in and of itself real.  We are too quick to make baptism into a mere prequel – something done to get to the meatier and mightier stuff of faith.  Though the water is mere water and to the eye nothing spectacular takes place, by the power of the Word of God and the Spirit of God something wondrous and mystical happens when water is applied in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Baptism actually does what it says and conveys what it signs.  

It is easy to dismiss and even despise baptism in favor of something we would consider more profound but to do so is to offend the favor of God who works in baptism that we might be His own children.  Even worse, it is to dismiss and despise what Jesus was doing when He entered the baptismal water.  If what our Lord did in going down to the waters of the Jordan to be baptized by John was mere drama or imagery, it failed miserably.  According to Mark’s account, when our Lord came up out of the water He saw heavens open, the Spirit descend like a dove, and heard the voice from heaven, “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”  Jesus did not need to hear it but surely those who were also down in the water with John did.  And, you might be thinking, we need to hear it, too.  Those who might think they need to be saved, might have expected something more.  Indeed many churches have tried to add some pizzaz to it all.

The power of baptism is not the show.  It is not in the amount of water you use or if you do down under the water with your entire body.  It is not in how you feel before you are baptized or during your baptism or after your baptism.  The power of baptism lies in the Christ who is there in the baptismal water, fulfilling what He has said He would do and keeping His promise to those who are baptized.  Baptism saves because Christ and the power of His cross is in that baptismal water.

When our Lord came down to the Jordan, He was unlike all who were baptized before Him and unlike all who have been baptized since.  He was holy and good and righteous.  John called for the guilty to come and instead the only righteous man since Eden came.  He came not because He had something to gain in the baptismal water but because He had something to give.  He went into the water pure and came up stained with every sin known to man – your sins and mine.  He stepped out of the water with the mark of our sins all over Him.  

And the miracle is that the opening of heaven and the Spirit descending as a dove and the voice from heaven told Jesus what He now tells us.  This is why He came. He came not for the good who need a pat on the back but for sinners marked for death by their sins.  He came not for a symbol but for the means by which sinners would be made clean and the dead would be raised to life.  He came not to tell us what to do but to do for us what we could never do.  He came to pay for sin with the blood He shed in suffering unto death.  This is why baptism saves.  Because Christ is there in the water, the crucified Savior still washing us clean.    

Baptism saves not because it is a good show or because we are really into it.  Baptism saves because Christ is into it – so into it that He who is clean becomes dirty for us and we are dirty become clean in Him – so clean that the Father can find no more guilt in us and so clean that our conscience can no longer torment us with what we thought, said, or did.  Because He went down into the water holy, we are sinners come out clean.  Christ meets us in our sin but He will not leave us there.  He raises us to new life now and to the everlasting life that death cannot end.  Now the question for us is this.  What shall we do with the new life that Christ has given us?  If this is true, how then shall we live?

If you pay attention to all the exhortations of the New Testament, you soon see that they seldom threaten us with punishment in order to get us to do what is good and right.  Instead, they remind us of who we are and call us to walk worthy of our call. We who are God’s children not by anything we have decided or done are called to remember who we are.  We are not our own.  We have been bought with a price. The old person in us was killed, nailed to the cross, so that the new person created in Christ Jesus might rise up to live as His own to His glory forevermore.

We might think there need to be more consequences to our failings in order for us to be the better people we should be.  Sometimes we think that if God upped the ante a bit, maybe Christians would not so easily retreat to their old sinful ways.  But our Lord refuses to replace the promise with the threat.  Beloved, you are God’s children NOW, says John.  He says this because we too quickly forget it, dismiss what happens in our baptism, and revert to the idea that we are saved by what we do.  God does not coerce us into righteousness but tenderly reminds us that we have been baptized, forgiven all our sins, rescued from death and the grave, rescued from the power of the devil, and given the salvation we could not earn on our own.  Indeed the greatest fruit of baptism is that we are no longer at ease here, in the ordinary things of this mortal life – because we yearn for what is not yet, what is to come – not simply in the world but in us.

This morning, having passed by the font, dipping our fingers into the water, looking at the crucifix hidden in that water, our Lord bids us to life holy, upright, and godly lives in Christ.  Not because we are afraid of hell but because we have been given a bit of heaven.  The water that holds for us salvation held for Jesus suffering and death.  Yet this He was willing to endure that we might be free to belong to Him, to serve Him with unfettered joy, and to dwell with Him now and in eternity.  Baptism saves you.  Don’t be afraid of the promise of those words.  But neither dare you take them for granted.  Because Jesus willingness to suffer for us was well pleasing to our Heavenly Father, He has declared us well pleasing in His sight.  Thanks be to God!

Incarnational. . .

We always speak of the incarnation of our Lord but there is something to be said about faith itself being incarnational as well.  Faith is not something abstract or theoretical but the most practical and incaranational thing.  You cannot reduce faith simply to opinions or theories or likes.  It cannot be reduced merely to words on a page and an intellectual agreement with something in the abstract.  It most certainly is beyond a pious slogans or saying or mantra.  It is about life.  The God who enters our humanity in order that He might tabernacle within us.  It is not about a personal holiness which merits God's affection but the affection of God that is manifest in a holiness not our own but which becomes ours in baptism.  It is about a new life, a transformed life, that is not the fruit of our effort but is indeed a partnership with the Spirit -- the Spirit doing the heavy lifting, of course.  It is about not being beyond the Law while at the same time being out of its reach -- no longer being condemned by it but yet learning by the Spirit to love it and to walk in its ways. 

True faith is always incarnational -- it takes on flesh and in this case my flesh.  God dwells in me as an act of His pure grace and the Spirit awakens within me the knowledge of this truth and the joy of it.  Even more, the Spirit works in me so that this incarnated faith in me may serve as witness and proclamation to the world of the goodness of His love and the sufficiency of His grace and of the unchanging character of His mercy.  We human beings are not purely spirit.  We cannot be reduced to our feelings nor are we mere intellect and will.  We are embodied creatures by God's design.  We are  flesh and blood -- not simply as a container for our spiritual nature but as part of who we are.  We cannot be something other than the material creatures we are and were created to be.  So God became incarnate for His incarnate creation.  Faith is not then something imagined or felt or reasoned by lived. Glorify God in your body -- is this anything but a call to live out your faith?

We are so goofy that we often reject this incarnational shape of us and our faith.  We say to those who cannot be present in their bodies to be with us in "spirit."  It sounds good but what does it really mean?  What good is it to have loved ones who are apart from us but with us in spirit -- unless we shall be with them and they with us in the new and glorified flesh that is God's promise and pledge?  We do not believe in the circle of life -- of spirits who descend to inhabit flesh for a time before they ascend from the flesh to return as spirit.  God may be spirit but we surely are not.  We are fleshly creatures -- not simply in the sense of sin but as who we are by God's creative design.  Flesh does not always mean sinful flesh.  Being a creature is not a bad thing.  God made us this way.  Being a creature to our Creator God is not bad or even a reflection of sin's work corrupting things; it is who we are.  I fear that we have emphasized flesh so much in the sense of sinful flesh that we have forgotten this.  

The radical dimension of Protestantism always tries to tie faith to an even usually having to do with our cognition or decision -- or accepting the Lord as “personal Lord and Savior.”  Sometimes we Lutherans also adopt such language.  Sacramental Christians are also tempted to tie faith to an event -- like baptism (or even confirmation).  But the reality is that we were baptized into a way of life.  It is not an event in isolation but one that is lived out within the realm of the means of grace -- the Word and the Sacraments.  Though we may try, you cannot make the event live in isolation from the life it bestows.  Devout Christians go to Church, are people in the Word, live under the doctrines and dogmas we profess, and seek to live, as best they might, holy, upright, and godly lives.  This is also a dimension of our incarnational faith.  What we do is not what saves us (only what Christ did) but that does not mean how we live is incidental to our faith.  Though faith and works are distinguishable, they are always together.  Indeed, faith without works is dead (it is not faith!).  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us once in Christ Jesus and again in each of us.  And to those who received Him He gave the power to become the children of God.  What a blessing to remember and rejoice in this gift and grace!

Unity - the Mystery of the Body

Sermon preached for the Epiphany of Our Lord, January 6, 2024.

The mystery of the body, according to St. Paul, is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs with the Jews.  This is described not as an aspect of that great mystery but as THE mystery of Christ.  So the children of Abraham who knew the Lord only by faith in the promise of what was to come become co-heirs of the Kingdom with the Gentiles who knew nothing of the promise and only of its fulfillment.  That is a mystery.

We are tempted to believe that the mystery is somehow about the diversity of the Body of Christ – the fact that we all do not look alike or sound alike or come from the same background.  We hear that in this way because this is the diversity our culture values.  That is not, however, what St. Paul had in mind nor is it the significance of Magi and Shepherds and Gentiles of every kind kneeling before the infant Redeemer.

The mystery of Christ is not simply that He unites in common cause the diversity that passes for Christianity.  No, indeed.  He does not bring together the disparate and different skin tones and accents and eyes as some grand work of compromise and negotiation.  He merges the distinctions so important on earth but unworthy of Christ and His kingdom.  There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male or female, child or adult in Christ.  In Christ they are one.

What on earth is worked by toleration, acceptance, and compromise is in Christ worked by the common birth of baptism, the common life of faith, and the common hope of the resurrection of the dead.  We do not make a place for others but the others become us and we become them.  In fact, there is no more us and them in the language of Epiphany.  We are all one in Christ.

We want God to create a better world in which the differences and distinctions we value are preserved.  We like the separate but equal idea of things so long as we get to traverse the forbidden boundaries when we want.  It is comfortable and easy to think of a world in which me is preserved but within a community that accepts me.  This is surely the nature of the church the world would value.  But it is not quite what Christ calls unity.  The mystery of Christ is that the old you with all of your distinctions and differences is gone.  You are reborn into the only identity that counts – you belong to Me, says the Lord.
Here on earth we live with divided loyalties.  We are husband or wife but not only so.  We preserve our own individual identities as well.  Even when we have a child we are not simply mommy or daddy.  We are in a constant balancing act of the different identities and the different callings.  It is exhausting.  Like the circus act that spins the plates and runs around to keep them all spinning, the worldly version of unity is tiring and tiresome.  Nobody wins yet we all want to.

Only in Christ can barriers be replaced with bridges, fences with gates, and property lines with common ownership.  Christ does not buy us out so that we become wholly owned subsidiaries of Him.  He takes us into Himself in baptism.  There we not only surrender our sins but our identities as people.  We are born anew not in to individual identities but as the children of God.  Family is more important than individuality.  Belonging is more important than independence.  Unity is not something we strive for but the product of being washed in the blood of the Lamb and confessing the “I believe” of the creed.

The world’s version of unity is fragile.  We cater to the complainers and act out of deference to the important folks and out of guilt against those who have been forgotten or abused along the way.  We are constantly taking the temperature of this unity to see if everyone is happy, everyone is okay, and everyone is onboard.  But this is not unity.  This is a job of constant polling and answers in which we are constantly realigning ourselves and resetting the markers of our identities.  This has become what the Church does today.  We count unity by the number of faces not like our own or the accents spoken or the cultures represented.  God assumes them all into Himself.  He forges a unity not with consent or power of the people but by killing them and raising them to the new and everlasting lives He has won.

Epiphany was a gift to the gift bearers from the East.  They went home different people.  They bore a saving message to those at home – there is no place for you in Christ.  There is only Christ in whom you have an everlasting place.  This is the unity of the Table as well.  We do not come for our private moment with the King but to share in the common table of the Lord, each of us receiving the same gift of His flesh for the life of the world and His blood to cleanse us from all sin.  This is the unity of the Word.  We do not hear what we hear but what God says to all manner of people and times and places.  In Bethlehem Jesus said the Jews had life in Him.  In the Magi, Jesus says Gentiles have life in Him.  On Sundays and Thursdays, we admit the same mystery.  We all only have life in Christ the Savior!

Thoughts about baptismal sponsors. . .

By now you have all heard it. Pope Francis has declared that those with the various desires and gender alphabets are good to go to be baptismal sponsors. If the Pope says it, it must be right. Right? Before we jump on the Pope, we ought to remember what it means to be a baptismal sponsor.

Our hymnal puts it this way:

 Address to Sponsors

P Beloved in the Lord, from ancient times the Church has observed the custom of appointing sponsors for baptismal candidates and catechumens. In the Evangelical Lutheran Church sponsors are to confess the faith expressed in the Apostles’ Creed and taught in the Small Catechism. They are, whenever possible, to witness the Baptism of those they sponsor. They are to pray for them, support them in their ongoing instruction and nurture in the Christian faith, and encourage them toward the faithful reception of the Lord’s Supper. They are at all times to be examples to them of the holy life of faith in Christ and love for the neighbor.

P [Names of the sponsors], is it your intention to serve [name of candidate] as sponsors in the Christian faith?

R Yes, with the help of God.

P God enable you both to will and to do this faithful and loving work and with His grace fulfill what we are unable to do.

C Amen.

Those who produced the hymnal have done us a great service here. Sponsors are not those who we love but those who confess the faith. Which faith? The faith of the Creed and Catechism. They are not nice people but Christian people with whom you commune because you share a common faith -- though, perhaps, separated by geography and age. This presumes that sponsors are members of the same church body or one in fellowship. Sponsors are witnesses but not merely witnesses. They must confess the same faith but they need not be present to have eyes on the baptism. They are there to do more than attest to what they saw. They are to pray for, support, and encourage the baptized in their life of faith, from the instruction of the home to the instruction in the Church. They are to help make sure that the baptized do not become strangers to God's Word or His House. The goal of all of this is that they may join the parents and sponsors at the rail, receiving the body and blood of our Lord. So obviously this precludes someone whose faith is in conflict with the faith into which the child is being baptized. Baptists and others who refuse infant baptism cannot be sponsors for the baptism of infants and small children. Those who do not believe that baptism is a means of grace and that it actually bestows what it promises and delivers what it signs cannot be sponsors. Those who speak of faith as a decision or who presume repentance is the precondition for faith cannot be sponsors among us.

In addition to this, they are to be examples of the holy life of faith in Christ and love for neighbor. This is not incidental to the role and place of sponsors. They are, within the bounds of human frailty, examples of the holy life of faith and the faithful. This surely means that they do not live in public or outward conflict with God's Word and commands (cohabitation, same sex marriage, promiscuity, trans, etc...). No one is perfect but that does not mean we do not strive in our earthly life to live in conformity with God's Word and command in our daily lives. If Pope Francis had the Lutheran Service Book on his desk, he would have been reminded of why some folks do not serve as sponsors. It is not being rude or arrogant or strict or narrow minded. It is being serious about the things of God. Anyone can be a witness to a baptism and there is no absolute requirement that there be sponsors but if you are going to choose sponsors, choose those who confess a faith you share and whose lives are lived under the cross. Holiness may not be achievable in this mortal life but it is certainly still the goal and shape of all we think, say, and do. We endeavor under the aid of the Holy Spirit to love the Lord with all our heart, body, mind, and soul. Do yourself a favor and consider what the liturgy teaches and you are asking your sponsors to do before you actually reach out to pick them.

Follow the light. . .

According to reports, the Pope told his Vatican staff:

[It is] important to keep advancing and growing in their understanding of the truth. Fearfully sticking to rules may give the appearance of avoiding problems but only ends up hurting the service that the Vatican Curia is called to give the church, he said.

“Let us remain vigilant against rigid ideological positions that often, under the guise of good intentions, separate us from reality and prevent us from moving forward,” the pope said. “We are called instead to set out and journey, like the Magi, following the light that always desires to lead us on, at times along unexplored paths and new roads.”

Oddly enough, the Pope advocates following the light but he seems not to know where the light will lead.  In this respect, he is at a very different point than the Magi.  They knew what they were looking for.  They clearly asked at Bethlehem:  Where is the One who is born King of the Jews?  While they may not have been sure what city in which to find the Messiah, they knew who to ask for.  The Magi may have been many things but the light was not some illumination without identity or purpose.  They had gifts for a king in their baggage and they followed the light that promised to lead them where the Christ was born.  They were not put off by seeing a baby but knelt before Him in worship.  That is the point the Pope seems to have missed.  He equates the journey of the magi as a path of illumination which cannot be predicted or planned.  That is not the path of the Magi.  It should no be the path of the faith or the faithful.

Unlike Luther who was captive to the Word of God, the Pope is acting like a petulant child.  He is always angry at someone and mostly at those who pay attention to the Scriptures and the faithful tradition and who seek to hold to it and pass it on to those to come.  According to the Pope, they are rigid ideologues but in reality he is the ideologue imposing upon Scripture his own opinions, preferences, and likes and passing them off as the light.  He seems to complain about anyone and everyone except those who ignore the voice of God's Word and depart from the sacred tradition once delivered to the faithful.  

The Pope worries about being separated from the reality of the world around us and the voice of culture and society.  Are we not called out to be distinct -- in but not of the world?  The Pope believes that holding to the sacred deposit will hinder us from moving forward.  Under whose idea of progress?  The Lord is our path and our goal and we have no future apart from that which is in Christ and to Christ.  How odd it is that the Christian world has come to the point where every time this man opens his mouth, we wince and cringe?  The liberals wince and complain that he has not really changed what they want changed and the conservatives wince and complain that he has turned the clarity of the Gospel into a sea of mud and confused the world even more over what the Gospel is and who Christ is.

If there was ever a time when Lutherans lamented the pitiful situation among us and longed for the safer confines of Rome, this Pope has exposed the weaknesses that make it impossible for this writer to consider dipping a toe into the Tiber and ought to give anyone pause.  We may long for a figure of a leader who may advance true Christianity and relieve us of our individual burdens as the faithful and faithful parishes.  The reality is that the Christian congregation around the Word and Sacraments administered by their pastor has always been an island in a turbulent sea of lies and falsehoods.  Rome will not save us but the Pope seems determined to do his best to sink the orthodox and catholic witness amid a sea of confusion created by his own words and works.  Neither will any of the other headquarters or structures we set up be the refuges or saviors we seek.  We cannot rely on our leaders or defer to them what belongs to us -- the faithful pastors and people of God who live and serve where we are.   We follow the LIGHT and it always leads to Christ.  The Pope seems to have forgotten this and liberal Christianity refuses to acknowledge it but we dare never forget it.

Death by DEIA. . .

When it comes to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, there should be little left to surprise or shock us but this is a new low for a church body which has long ago shelved its credentials as a Lutheran or orthodox Christian body.  The ELCA is a church body even whiter than the Missouri Synod and that is no small feat.  Yet the ELCA has taken as part of its core identity and values to promote the causes of diversity, inclusiveness, equity, and accessibility.  If this will not happen by a natural form of church growth, the ELCA will make this happen legislatively.  This is hardly a new approach for a church body whose 1988 merger was orchestrated by special interest groups, marked by quotas of representation, and built upon the idea of new is better than old.

A year or more ago the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America decided to contract with consultants to see how to make them more woke than they were.  Quite literally they paid a small fortune to audit their policies, procedures, and identity to see if they were living up to their values.  An external auditing group was engaged to “conduct a comprehensive audit of the ELCA’s governing documents for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA).”  The ELCA wanted to know how they were doing, where they were failing to implement the values of the DEIA practices and values they esteemed so highly and to recommend what should be done to make them become the woke body their leaders thought they should become as clergy, agencies, and institutions of the denomination.

Now all of this might be laughable if it were not that the leadership has clearly decided that this is the most serious of business -- even more serious than proclaiming Christ and Him crucified or confessing the creed or living up to the Lutheran Confessions.  You can read it all for yourself in the “Recommended Minimum DEIA Standards for Churchwide Organization” which include some of the following recommendations:

• Review and rewrite all personnel policies of the ELCA to reflect DEIA values.
• Set a new quota system to ensure that at least 10% of all the members of assemblies, councils, committees, boards, and every other organizational units must be Persons of Color and/or Non-Primary English Speaking Persons; plus another quota of an additional 10% of persons from Historically Underrepresented Groups (Gender Fluid persons, LGBTQIA+ persons, persons who possess a disability, etc.).  
• Extend the implementation of the Recommended Minimum DEIA Standards to congregations within the synods.
• Create an approved list of DEIA training educational materials and seminar providers (as well as those who have taken such training).
• Put into place much stronger DEIA personnel policies within synod offices and manage enforcement of those policies.
• Mandate annual DEIA training for all pastors, church staff and lay leaders (everyone on roster or serving as an elected or appointed leader) by an Approved Provider to include among other topics:

1. DEIA from a Biblical standpoint and why is it important...
2. The use of DEIA to advance the values of the Kingdom of God..
3. Identification of microaggressions against members of historically marginalized groups...
4. The resulting feelings of alienation and exclusion among members of historically marginalized groups due to microaggressions...
5. The Christian’s duty to intervene and alleviate microaggressions...
6. The means to a church more open, inviting and loving to members of historically marginalized groups (who have felt fear, rejection, or hostility from the ELCA on any level)...
7. Identifying and understanding Christian White Nationalism... the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement... and other groups involved in or opposed to DEIA...
8. The politics of DEIA, how this fits within the church, and what should not be addressed by the church...

Perhaps most concerning is the use of DEIA standards as another litmus test applied to pastors and those preparing for the pastoral ministry within the ELCA -- indeed one more strongly promoted than Biblical, creedal, and confessional orthodoxy.  What is also concerning is that little is publicly addressed about this move or about the actual standards being applied.  Indeed, as we have repeatedly seen in the past, the changes in the ELCA are promoted as one thing while ending up being something very different.  What has happened here is that the changes of the 2009 Church Wide Assembly no longer allow for possibility but have become enforceable standards that judge the people, policies, and actions of this church body.

Great by bringing human wisdom captive to faith. . .

The saint and doctor of the Church who would be known as Albertus Magnus was born sometime before the year 1200. He was probably born in Bavaria, inferred by his own reference to himself as "Albert of Lauingen," a town which still stands today in southern Germany.  We have few details of his family origins, but it appears he was well educated -- attending the University of Padua whose instruction in Aristotelian philosophy would become the foundation of his work.  His great student, Thomas Aquinas, was recognized as a saint and doctor of the Church. Aquinas died in 1274 and Albert spent his last years defending the work of Aquinas.  He died in 1280.

All of this may be of little interest to you but I noticed something in the collect for his day that should be.  The older version of the collect said, in part:  O God, who didst make blessed Albert, Thy bishop and Doctor, great by his bringing human wisdom into captivity to divine faith. . .  Now there is a phrase.  He was made great by bringing his human wisdom captive to divine faith.  You do not hear that so often anymore.  In fact, the history of Christianity has, at least in more modern times, suffered by the imposition of reason over the Word of God and faith.  Consider the role and outcome of such things as higher criticism when applied to Scripture and the dawn of the modern era with its distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of Scripture.

The older collect acknowledges that God makes Albert great because he brought human wisdom into captivity to divine faith (in humana sapientia divinae fidei subjicienda). This is surely what St. Paul was talking about in his letters to the Corinthians:  “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.  We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:4–5).  This is surely the position of Proverbs and the Psalms in speaking of godly wisdom and the fear of God which is its beginning.  But we do not hear much about this anymore.  In fact, reason and faith have become enemies with respect to science and education.  In light of this, Rome altered the collect to soften it.  It now simply says Albert was made great by his joining of human wisdom to divine faith.  He joined reason and human wisdom to faith as if both were equals and neither ruled the other.  It was a complement of one to the other without the primacy being assigned to the faith itself.

Christ is ours not simply for the transformation of desire in the heart or behavior in actions but also for the transformation of the mind.  Christ has come to take captive earthly wisdom and to order it and replace it with the heavenly wisdom that is of the Spirit.  But we do not here much about that.  Instead we are constantly reminded by the so-called scholars and elite that Scripture's claims are neither tenable or credible and must be parsed by reason and normed by human wisdom.  In the end this makes no one great and replaces the divine with the frail and fragile thoughts that would rule over Christ and His Spirit.  In this there is little salvation to be offered to anyone nor is there any great teaching to demand our attention unless Christ is all in all.

Real Radicalism. . .

The sad truth is that the edge is not very sharp anymore.  Being on the cutting edge of things with respect to worship or doctrine or exegesis is not what it once was.  The edge has become dull because everyone is doing it.  Everyone is dumbing down the content and practice of the faith in pursuit of a people who they will notice that the Church is just like them.  Worship has become casual to the point where nobody believes that being in the presence of God is a big deal -- not something awesome or full of awe -- it is ordinary, common, and dull.  Doctrine has become like the old clothes in your closet which you are sentimentally attached to but which you will never wear again.  We wait for those who come after us to finally toss them out.  Everyone admits and glories in the things they have trouble believing or simply refuse to believe.  The God who is one person wide and deep has produced doctrine which is the same.  Scripture has become the book we all love to hate and we all rewrite with our own authoritative definition of what the words mean.  We play around at pronouns while ignoring the preaching of the kingdom.  We all know why the things in the Bible cannot be true but we cannot even name the things that are.  Where is the cutting edge in all of this?

Even the Pope is on this bandwagon.  He sets up all sorts of hopes and expectations and smiles to the priests and theologians who jump on his cue.  We will bless the alphabet soup of sexual desire and gender.  We will slowly incorporate them into the fuller life of the Church.  They will not have to bother addressing the behaviors which conflict with God's Word.  It is all good.  Throw in an idol on the altar of St. Peter's or goofy up the Mass with the strangest foolishness you can imagine and it is all good.  There is no edge in the edginess anymore.  No one is shocked anymore by what people refuse to believe (according to one poll 67% of Roman Catholics do not believe Christ is really present in the Eucharist).  It is normal.  It is the same way among Lutherans.  You can go to a Lutheran Church where the kerygma is about sex or gender or the worship looks like the big box evangelical church down the road and no one gets excited.  The edge is dull and we are dull.  The most outlandish things you can imagine have become normal.

Except for orthodoxy.  The Pope does not get excited about those who press the limits of what it means to believe but if you permit the Latin Mass or get too upset about abortion or fail to fly your rainbow flag and if you are a bishop, your diocese will be declared vacant and if you are a priest you will be cancelled.  Lutherans will jump ship in their congregation or work to get their pastor fired for incense or reservation or vestments or genuflecting in the Divine Service and the administrators will almost always go along with those who decry the rigid liturgical types.  But they treat with kid gloves those who refuse to practice close(d) communion or stop online communion or have turned their sanctuaries into MMA arenas or infotainment centers for the latest in self-help stuff.  We can even abide those who refuse to put Lutheran in their name (perhaps we should all be relieved about this one!) but we draw the line at being too Lutheran (translate that catholic).  The cutting edge of Christianity is not on how far out ahead you can get but how close you reflect that which was always and everywhere believed and practiced.  The pope and those in Lutheran jurisdictions have proved this point too many times.  Most of the other church bodies have departed so far from the faith that there is no one even left to complain (except about the random voices of those who still believe).  Just do not be rigid about what Scripture plainly says, our creeds confess, and our confessional documents testify.

The most dangerous person is the world is the orthodox and faithful Christian pastor or lay person.  If you want to live on the edge, try living there.  But you might want to purchase a flak jacket or body armor.

Sadness. . .

It was announced on GetReligion.Org that this site will close on February 2, 2024.  Every thinking person who struggles with the way religion is reported upon will join me in sadness over this decision.  I want to personally extend my appreciation to Terry Mattingly and his friends who kept this going for the last two decades and for his continued presence on Issues, Etc.  Until it closes, you can read on its new stories here and the archive will remain up for the unforeseen future.

All of this reflects an amazing transformation in journalism.  First, of course, is the fact that the difference between facts and commentary have been blurred to the point where most thinking Americans join me in meeting the news with some apprehension and skepticism.  Second is the sad reality that the news media has become an impossible term including not only traditional news outlets but all sorts of things that, in the past, would never have been called news media.  Third is that the media has been reduced to sound bytes and tweets which cannot possibly unwrap the complexities of what is really happening and thus leaving the consumer of news with a paucity of information and a plethora of opinion.  Last is that religion has become the unreported or under-reported component of the news and the majority of those reporting have less than a peripheral understanding of the religions affecting or in the news.

I grew up in an era in which every small town newspaper had religious reporting and every larger newspaper had regular paid religion reporters who had both an interest in and an expertise in the area.  I grew up when TIME magazine had a religion column and religious figures and stories routinely were given the cover of that weekly news magazine.  I grew up as a consumer of religious news in which I both expected and anticipated elaborate reporting on the religious backgrounds and interests in the major stories of the day.  No, it was not perfect.  It was not even always solid.  But there was an effort to unpack the stories of the day and of the week with full attention to the religious components of these events and the figures who played a large role in them.  Sadly, today we find ourselves suffering from a glut of superficial reporting especially on religion and the religious factors of the stories that make the headlines.  It has left us ignorant and uninterested.  I wish it were simply that we did not have good, solid religion reporting but the damage done is worse.  We no longer care about religion at least in the sense that we once did.  That is a tragedy.

Last Christmas I came home late after the final service of the night and flipped through channels to see if there was any reporting on what the Pope had said or any services being played or replayed.  There were none.  Imagine that.  The world has a couple of billion of self-identified Christians in it and the media was more interested in showing Christmas movies like Die Hard rather than report on one of the most significant days of the year -- not just for Christians only!  Thank you, Terry Mattingly and those who with him at GetReligion -- those who worked to report on and hold the media's feet to the fire about their own reporting on religious stories.  I wish you would never close up shop.  Speaking for myself, I will miss you.  God bless you.

Now greet. . .

Now greet the swiftly changing year
With joy and penitence sincere.
Rejoice! Rejoice! With thanks embrace
Another year of grace.
    
Remember now the Son of God
And how He shed His infant blood.
Rejoice! Rejoice! With thanks embrace
Another year of grace.

This Jesus came to end sin’s war;
This Name of names for us He bore.
Rejoice! Rejoice! With thanks embrace
Another year of grace.

His love abundant far exceeds
The volume of a whole year’s needs.
Rejoice! Rejoice! With thanks embrace
Another year of grace.

With Him as Lord to lead our way
In want and in prosperity,
What need we fear in earth or space
In this new year of grace!
    
“All glory be to God on high,
And peace on earth!” the angels cry.
Rejoice! Rejoice! With thanks embrace
Another year of grace.
    
God, Father, Son, and Spirit, hear!
To all our pleas incline Your ear;
Upon our lives rich blessing trace
In this new year of grace.

 

His watch is over. . .

Sermon preached on the First Sunday after Christmas, Sunday, December 31, 2023.

     There comes a time when our turn on the great watch for Christ comes to an end.  Sometimes it comes with surprise.  Death steals away the rest of our lives and Christ steals that life from death.  We have no time to plan or prepare or for others to prepare.  We have all been there.  In our weeping and sorrow we wonder how death could come so quickly.  A heart attack or car accident or violence.  We are left with pieces, pieces of life, of dreams now broken, and of best laid plans undone.

    Sometimes it comes with great fanfare.  A long planned retirement, a gold watch, a dinner, a testament of words, and a celebration.  We have all been there too.  We have go to plenty of retirement celebrations – maybe even our own.  Our time on the watch is over and our place carefully handed over to another.  Even with plans and preparations, it seems to sneak up on us and we have to figure out what it all means.  Who are we now this part of our life is over and what will begin when we wake up tomorrow.

    Simeon gives us another picture.  He has stood watch in the household of God year after year.  It was the Lord’s promise that He will not die until he has seen the Lord’s Christ.  It might have been easy to go to the Temple and watch in the beginning.  But like everything, it must have gotten old.  Every face of a stranger that was once looked upon with great hope and expectation – is he the one? – eventually gives way to boredom and weariness.  Where is the Lord’s Christ and when will He come?  Israel had long ago stopped watching and stopped waiting and simply gotten along with life.  We hear it all the time.  Get over it.  Get on with life.  Live.

    But Simeon did not waver.  He was there every day.  Waiting upon the Lord’s timing.   Watching for the Lord’s promise to be fulfilled.  Now he is old.  Some probably thought that Simeon had wasted his life away waiting on the Lord.  He should have retired from his place before death came and ended it.  Simeon did not pay attention either to the aches of age in his body or the weariness of wondering when the Lord would keep His Word.  He stayed His place.  And then it happened.  Into the Temple came a woman with a Son, forty days old, to present Him to the Lord and to receive purification after childbirth.  Simeon looked and the Spirit told him this was the One He has been waiting for and watching for all his life.

    At that moment, Simeon knew his watch was over.  He did not know or care how long he lived or what in life awaited him anymore.  He has seen enough.  He had seen the Lord’s Christ, the long promised Messiah.  He had held the Son of God in his arms.  He had blessed the Lord for this privilege – no matter how long he had waited or how weary the waiting and watching had become.  And then He sings:   Lord, now You let Your servant go in peace; Your word has been fulfilled.
        My own eyes have seen the salvation which You have prepared in the sight of every people: A light to reveal You to the nations and the glory of Your people Israel.

    We have all been there too.  Every Sunday in the Divine Service.  We sing with Simeon the words of watching and waiting fulfilled.  But we did not cradle Jesus in our arms.  We cradled Him upon our lips and in our bodies in Holy Communion.  Every Sunday we sing with Simeon that our watch is over.  Some of us may die before we can gather again here in the Lord’s House.  Some of us may struggle under the weight of bad news or other loss.  Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.  We do not know what will accompany our future after this, but whatever that is, it is nothing in comparison to what we experienced here, at this altar, in this Holy Communion.  Whether we are old and our days are nearing their end or young and not even counting those days, it does not matter.  We know who we are watching for and who we are waiting for.  Jesus, to bring to completion all that He began in us when He comes in His glory.  That is our end.

    Today is the last day of a calendar year.  It is a day in which we lament all that we regretted doing or saying or not doing or not saying.  It is a day in which we remember those who began the year with us and are now with the Lord.  It is a day when we face a future in which only one thing is certain.  The Lord keeps His promises.  The politics divide and Jesus unites.  The culture indulges and Jesus teaches self-control.  The world pursues aimless existence and Jesus gives us a place, a purpose, and a plan for our lives.  The world gets rid of evil by calling it good and gets rid of goodness by calling it evil but Jesus deals with our sin with His blood.  His blood first shed when He was circumcised into the covenant of Abraham as preview of the blood of the new and eternal covenant shed on the cross.  The world makes peace with death but Jesus kills death with His life stronger than death and strong enough to raise up those dead in trespasses and sin.  And so we learn in Jesus not to weep for what was anymore than to fear what might be.  Our watching and waiting are fulfilled once for all in Christ.

    The world will awaken tomorrow, many with a hangover and all of us with the same problems we had today and the same uncertainties we face today and the same lies that pass for truth as they have today.  But in Christ, knowing our watching and waiting are fulfilled in Christ, we meet the new day and the new month and the new week and the new year with confidence.  This is the day the Lord has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.  And more than this, we meet the future as Simeon, echoing the words of his song not only in Church but in every day life.

        Lord, now You let Your servant go in peace; Your word has been fulfilled.
        My own eyes have seen the salvation which You have prepared in the sight of every people: A light to reveal You to the nations and the glory of Your people Israel.

    We watch and wait no more for the Savior but we do for Him to come as King and Judge and to finish what He began, in us, and in all things.  This may not yet be the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.  Amen.