Readings - Exodus 3:1-15; Acts 4:8-12; Luke 2:21

Sermon

Old Testament and Epistle - Exodus 1:8-22; Revelation 14:1-5

Gospel - Matthew 2:13-18

Sermon

Old Testament and Epistle - Isaiah 52:6-10; Hebrews 1:1-12

Gospel - John 1:1-14

Sermon

First Reading - Isaiah 9:2-7

Third and Fourth Readings - Romans 5:6-11; Titus 3:3-7

Fifth and Sixth Readings - Luke 2:1-14, 15-20

Sermon

Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity
 
Promises can be broken.  This is the sad reality we know too well.  Everyone here has suffered the anguish of a promise broken.  Maybe it was a promise to keep something confidential.  Maybe it was a promise to return something in the condition it was in when you lent it and you received it back damaged, or not at all. More painfully, maybe it was the promise made in the vows of holy matrimony, to be faithful to you and your spouse cheated.  Regardless of the broken promise, every one of us knows what distrust, cynicism, heartbreak, and ruined relationships come from a broken promise. 
 
This earthly pain and hesitancy to trust again is something the devil uses to his advantage.  Even before that pain existed Satan worked on our first parents to get them to doubt God’s Word and to question His goodness.  His entire goal is to get us to turn our back on God, to see Him as a liar, and to fear, love, and trust anyone but Him. 
 
This is never truer than when something in life goes wrong.  When the effects of sin rear their ugly head and someone in your life gets a terminal diagnosis, or you fail a major assignment, or you don’t get a spot on a team or in a show, or the person you thought was your friend abandons you, or you’re fired from your job, or your electricity is turned off because you couldn’t pay the bill, or your child dies.
 
 In those moments Your temptation is to call God a liar, to accuse Him of neglecting you, of failing to uphold His end of the God-child relationship.    The temptation is to forsake faith in Him, to walk away from Him and rely on yourself alone.  And it is so easy to do that, to believe the lies about God that the devil, the world, and our flesh tell us.  In those times we are forced to deal with two conflicting realities: First, that God loves us dearly and protects us, and second, that we are bearing a tremendous cross.  Those two realities seem irreconcilable.  The devil tells us, just like he told Adam and Eve, that if God really loves you He wouldn’t hold out on you, He wouldn’t allow any pain of any kind befall you, even if that pain is something as minor as not being allowed to eat from one tree in a garden full of the greatest food any human has ever experienced. 
 
So, your trust falters and you lose your footing as you carry that cross.  You consider those earthly promises made to you and how people let you down.  You let those times of sin color how you look at God.  Your flesh believes Him to be as untrustworthy as the gossiping friend, cheating spouse, or swindling business partner.  You trusted them wholly, but they broke their promise and crushed you, so maybe God has done that too.
 
That place between faith in God and complete trust in His fatherly divine goodness and mercy is where we find ourselves, just like the nobleman in today’s Gospel.  Like him, you have had to walk an exhausting road fighting with the two polar opposites.  In his head he had to fight between his son’s severe illness and probable death and the declaration of Jesus, “Your son lives.”  You know what swirled in his head because it swirls in yours, too.  Did God really say?  Of course He did, and He cannot lie or break a promise.  Is God really powerful to mend what sin has marred?  He created heaven and earth by a word, allowed Israel to pass through the Red Sea on dry ground, and raised the dead, so He can right my wrongs as well.  Does God really love me?  His Son willingly died for your sin while you were till his enemy, so of course He loves you.
 
When you are Caught in that spiritual warfare, Satan’s lies on one side and God’s declaration on the other, remember that you have the protection you heard in today’s Epistle, the armor of god’s soldiers: righteousness, the gospel of peace, and salvation.  Take comfort in all of the armor God has given.  As fierce the fight and as many pieces of armor He has given you, notice that He has only given you one weapon, not an entire artillery but one, seemingly weak weapon, but one that is really the strongest ever: the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
 
When bitterness, doubt, despair, and unbelief threaten to gain the upper hand, take up the divine armor and the sword of the Word of God.  War against everything the devil and your flesh would have you give in to with things that are true and certain.  You have something far greater than a promise, you have a reality, something no one can take from you.  No maybe, no someday.  Like the nobleman you have a declaration: Your son lives.  It is finished.  I forgive you all your sin.  You are a child of paradise.  Your God does not deal in promises that may or may not be kept.  He does not deal in wishes and dreams.  He deals in absolute certainty, words that say what they mean and give what they say.
 
Forget those promises made and broken in this life.  Take your attention off the pain of the crosses your bear and find comfort in the nail-pierced hands that hold you and the armor with which He has covered you.  Look to the cross, trust Christ, and live, say with the faithful of every time and place: “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for Him; we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”

The Feast of All Saints
 
In just a few weeks, on the First Sunday in Advent, in the Epistle Reading we will hear the promise, “Salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.”  The distant triumph song of that blessed place steals on the ear.  Its sound is faint, but it is near.  We feebly struggle, we hunger and thirst, we suffer under so many crushing burdens: our own sin, the sin of others, the weight of a world decaying and dying.  The weight we bear is tremendous.  At times we lose hope and are convinced that it’s time to give up the fight, to give into the demonic temptation to believe that God has either abandoned us or forgotten us in a world that would love to dance on he rubble of church buildings and the ashes of the saints, in a world where our personal lives are a mess—pulled in too many directions while lack and need piles up all around, illnesses disrupt and death steals.  In short, all of us are acutely aware of the desperate need for Jesus to return.   But on this Feast of All Saints, the Revelation of Jesus Christ to Saint John does for us What it id for its first hearers about 1,900 years  ago.  It lifts us up out of this world and allows us to see what is going on in heaven right now, a scene we are reminded that, by God’s grace, we will soon enter.  What did John allow us to see with him?  The saints from care released.  The weary ones in rest, no longer scorched by sun, parched, or thirsting, without tear-stained faces.  Their praise is so exuberant that one word doesn’t cut it.  Their joy heaps up almost faster than the tongue can say it: “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”   Our blessed dead enjoy that as their reality, which gives great comfort.
 
But it is—present tense—yours as well.  You have that as your reality even though you don’t see it yet.  The term for that is inaugurated eschatology.  Eschatology—the last day—is yours, just not yet—it is inaugurated. By faith’s reception of Jesus’ death and resurrection and your Baptism into the same, what John showed us is going on in heaven is yours.  Your place is reserved in that innumerable company from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.  You’re there, but you just don’t see it yet.  It’s what you confess in the Creeds: I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.  It’s what John reassured us of in his Epistle: “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.”
 
Remembering that isn’t our chief struggle as Christians when confronted by death.  More often than not our struggle at death is maintaining our confession.  Our society overwhelmingly believes that everyone goes to heaven, regardless of what they believe—or don’t believe.  We’ve all gone to a visitation or funeral where the good works of the deceased are touted.  Jill was such a good person, so now she’s in heaven getting what she deserves.  Just like the Reformation: Where is the comfort in that?  Jill may have been an outwardly good person, but she was still a sinner.  Her good works could never be enough to cancel her sin and to earn favor in God’s eyes.  Typically we’ll respond to statements about works with a smile and a nod, agreeing that Jill is in heaven for her goodness.  We let the moment pass, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings out of fear of starting a fight.  We let an opportunity pass to confess the hope we have.  Which is exactly what the devil wants us to do: be quiet about Christ and rest on imagined goodness on our part.  We know what we ought to say, but fear stops us.  Death is not the time to be silent!  Death is the time to point people to Christ, to gently correct: You’re right, Jill was a great woman, but I’m thankful that she’s in heaven because of her faith God gave her and what Jeus did to save her from her sin.  When you do that, you’re going to get confused looks or an abrupt end of the conversation.  That may be, but God has called us to confess Jesus, the way, truth, and life especially when it’s difficult.  Sometimes it may have to go in the opposite direction.  Sometimes you might have to say the hard thing: He did a lot of good things, but I pray he had faith in Jesus.  He never gave any indication that God was part of his life.  That certainly won’t win any friends, but it is a necessary thing for us to do, to proclaim that there is no hope apart from Christ, no resurrection that works can earn.  The conversation doesn’t have to end there; it gives the opportunity to say something like,  “This is a good reminder to be open in telling people the wonderful work Jesus has done to give salvation.  I don’t want anyone to go without the confidence and comfort that comes from Christ.  I don’t want anyone to wonder if I was a Christian.  I’m not encouraging this to happen out of any kind of better-than-you arrogance, but to show how easily we keep silent about our faith, even when presented with perfect opportunities to point people to the comfort of Christ, the hope of All Saints Day, and the overwhelming joy of the resurrection.
 
Though we have all been sinfully silent at times, there is forgiveness in Christ.  And that is precisely our confidence!  The poor, miserable sinner is forgiven by Jesus, no mater how dark his deeds.  Everyone St. John saw in heaven was a sinner—past tense.  When your last day comes you will no longer have sin to confess, sins of others that hurts you, or the effects of sin slowly ruining this once good creation.
 
So, take heart!  You are forgiven.  Heaven is yours.  Your salvation is nearer now Than when you first believed.
 
 
 
 
 

The Festival of the Reformation
 
The Reformation was all about certainty.  Did you want to know that grandma was in heaven?  No one could know.  Had she enumerated every last sin before breathing her last?  Had enough merits of the saints been given to her to spring her soul from purgatory?  No one could know.  For all you knew she was to languish there until you purchased an indulgence, paid for a Mass on her behalf or saw another relic for her.  And what about you?  Sure, your Baptism started your heavenward journey, but did you love God enough?  Did you give enough?  Did you confess well enough?  Were you really forgiven?  Could you ever be forgiven?  No one could know.  There was no certainty, no one who would point you to the full cross and empty tomb and water of the font and name of the Triune God.  The result?  Fear of God, and not the good kind.  It was terror of judgment and hell.  There was no love of God, no eye that dared look to Him for good.  The lack of certainty drove men to despair.  Surely you all know about Luther’s struggle with hatred of God, terror of His eyes seeing him.  If he had certainty about anything it was that God hated him and was eager for any attempt to torture him. 
 
But the God who uses man’s evil for good took man’s corruption of the word and the terror it brought to bring Luther to Wittenberg to teach Scripture, beginning with the Psalms, at the university.  By his assignment to pore over every word of Scripture slowly and carefully Luther eventually found that His confidence in God’s wrath and love of judgment was misplaced.  He found that God’s will was not destruction of mankind, but man’s salvation, and that this desired salvation was not purchased or worked its way into but was given undeservedly and received as a gift.  Luther began to preach this and the world was changed.  Men found certainty of their salvation in Christ, in their Baptism, in the Absolution, and in the Supper, as it was supposed to be.  They rejoiced in those words of St. Paul that we heard a short time ago: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the Law.”  But none of this teaching, be it Paul or Luther, is a feeling or wish, but certainty.  That’s what Paul’s word” conclude” means.  It is a Greek word used in study, in legal or scientific investigation.  It is the conviction that the conclusion reached is beyond reasonable doubt true and certain.  It cannot by any means be proven wrong.  Man is justified, that is, declared entirely free from sin, released from death and the devil, entirely by the obedience, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, delivered by Baptism, received by faith created by the hearing of the Word of God, even by deaf ears  and infant minds unable yet to comprehend.  This certainty, obscured by satanic lies, was restored to brilliance in the Reformation as the Word of God was returned to the fore.  That is why today we give thanks to God: We have complete confidence in our salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
 
Luther looms large on this day and in the history of the Church, but it’s really not about Luther; he was merely the instrument God used in the sixteenth century.  Luther wasn’t the first to contend for the Gospel against its adversaries and he certainly was not the last.  We heard Jesus’ own word: “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence.”  Satan rages against the Christ.  He wants us to listen to him again like our parents in Eden.  He wants us to abandon free salvation for earned salvation, making the crucifixion of no effect.  He is why Jeremiah gave us our commission to implore God’s protection for His Church until the descent of the new Jerusalem out of heaven when there will be no more satanic attacks of false doctrine.  We are to give God no peace until that happens.  In other words, hold God to His Word, but also say to Satan what is certain: you are defeated.  Christ is victorious, His Word endures forever, and because I have His Holy Spirit you cannot lay a finger on me.
 
That certainty, that unwavering conviction of your forgiveness of every sin you have committed and every sin you will commit is what Reformation Day is about.  You don’t need to fret about your works, if you did enough, if your departed loved ones did enough, if you were really repentant enough, or any other if you can come up with.  You have certainty in Christ, given to you in Word and in Sacrament, received by faith created in you by something as ordinary as hearing.  With salvation this simple, all worked by the triune God, the only thing you can possibly have besides certainty is thanksgiving.