Rev. Shemwell
Jeremiah 23:5-8 Matthew 21:1-9 12/3/23 Homily for the Ad Te Levavi (First Sunday in Advent) In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Thus once spoke the holy prophet Zachariah approximately five hundred years before the birth of our blessed Messiah. Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the liturgical season of Advent, as you well know, is a season of anticipation. But if you didn’t already know, the word advent itself comes from the Latin word adventus, meaning “arrival.” The church year, this new church year so early upon us, begins with this period of anticipation for Christ’s arrival. It begins today, this first Sunday of the new church year. And while this time of year in particular is marked by an anticipation for our Lord’s glorious coming, for His arrival, in truth, all human history has been similarly marked by this same anticipation for the messianic advent. Men and women have been waiting for and longingly expecting a savior since the very beginning. The first man and the first woman were exiled from the garden with the hope of this precise anticipation. Genesis chapter three verses fourteen and fifteen: “So the Lord God said to the serpent”—with Adam and Eve in earshot, mind you!—“‘Because you have deceived My creation, you, serpent, are cursed more than all the cattle, and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall crush your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” 2 This profound passage has traditionally been called the protoevangelium – the first gospel – the incipient promise of bad news to the ancient dragon but exceptionally good news to our primordial parents that salvation would come, would arrive through the seed of the woman. Otherwise put, the King was coming from the very beginning. By the time the initial inclination toward disobedience entered the willing heart of our father, Adam, a plan was already had for redemption – a plan for salvation through the Son incarnate, through God made man, salvation through the woman’s eventual seed. In response to the woeful fall of all mankind into sin, God in His goodness and mercy gave the promise of deliverance straightaway. And this immediate promise was repeated again and again down through the ages. This is the promise that was given to Abraham, and to Isaac and Jacob, for that matter, that their progeny would include the saving seed. The same promise was subsequently spoken to God’s people through the lips of Moses himself: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren,” he declared. And despite the consistent failings and infidelities of God’s chosen people, that promise was safeguarded regardless. They were forgiven time and again, their sins were removed from them as far as the east is from the west, mistake after mistake was blotted out, and the promise was renewed in spite of every last fault, flaw, foible, and shortcoming on the part of the wayward Israelites. Now the same was true for David, that great and mighty king of theirs, who was likewise absolved of his many severe sins and was granted through a promise a place of prominence in his Lord’s own lineage. 3 After all, the righteous branch Who reigns as king and deals wisely, as Jeremiah prophesied in our reading this morning, came ultimately from the loins of the delinquent David, who was uncommonly repentant and therefore beloved by God. And of course, all the prophets of all time prophesied about the coming of the King and the fulfillment of the ancient promise. Isaiah foretold the virgin birth and the immeasurable suffering of the incarnate servant. All the way down through Zachariah and even beyond, the mouths of prophets gave new life to the anticipation of the King and Savior. And finally, the occasion at last arrived, the anticipation of thousands of years of hopeful waiting was met with the annunciation to that well-chosen maiden. The archangel Gabriel gave the blessed news to a peasant virgin girl, a descendent of David, as foreshadowed. She received it in utter humility, singing her magnificent Magnificat in reply. Her briefly scandalized betrothed heeded the word of the angel of the Lord instead of his own doubt and with true bravery he proudly took her as his wife. Then a baby boy was born in a manger in the little town of Bethlehem, Whom they called Immanuel, “God with us.” And as St. Matthew tells us at the outset of his gospel, “all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophets.” The promise of salvation made His home in a virgin womb. The King came in meekness and weakness, His advent was in the frail flesh of men and within the literal flesh of a very specific woman for nine months, He condescended to contain Himself in the abode of her fragile uterus. And while He came in lowliness, He came with promise and eternal purpose though, having everlasting salvation. From the moment of His birth nine months on, His eyes were set toward Golgotha, to the place of the skull, also called Calvary. 4 The woman’s seed promised in the garden to crush the head of the serpent had to be bruised Himself, as was told from the start. To defeat death, to undo the first mistake and negate the fall from grace, the enfleshed Savior had to endure overwhelming and extensive hardship in His own body and He had to die the most unjust death. He came in the flesh to save the flesh itself, but in order to do so, He had to let His own sinless flesh be tormented and crucified. God became man in order to die for man. The Incarnation of our Lord was all for the sake of the crucifixion of our Lord. Christmas always points towards Good Friday. God became a baby boy in order to die a thirty- three-year-old man, nailed to a cross for the transgressions of the whole world. And so He was put to death for our iniquities. Every single one of them. He bled out for our anger, our lust, our greed, our pride, our envy and unbelief. He suffered for the totality of our sins. He was buried for the perversion of our failures. But on the third day, He was resurrected whole for the promise of our hope. And that hope is what this season is really all about. We anticipate the coming of our Lord at Christmas. We anticipate the joyous opportunity to celebrate the glory of His Incarnation, His taking on flesh and bone so as to overcome sin, death, and the devil. But we look beyond that as well. We look forward to that day when He returns in all His glory, incarnate, in the flesh, to raise our flesh from the sorrowful grave. The King has already once come, right? So the anticipation is over in some sense. Yet it another sense, in a more visceral and tenderly present sense, the anticipation only begins anew. Our Lord came to heal us, and so He has – without any merit or worthiness on our part. 5 However, this side of heaven and indeed this side of His crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension above, those of us left here below are still faced with sin, death, and the devil. The struggle continues for now. The war was won on the cross two thousand years ago. But we are still confronted with the fallout, with the consequences of God’s wrath in this earthly existence. Eternally we are free. And yet here in time we remain bound to the lingering difficulties of this broken world. Nevertheless, we have immense hope, for we anticipate with the sureness of faith the final fulfillment of God’s promise of deliverance. Christ, God made man, once said: “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.” Our Lord ascended into the heavens long, long ago. However, He will come again. He will descend on the clouds just as He once ascended. And when He arrives, He will deliver us once and for all from this land of bitterness. The arrival of the incarnate Son with all His angels from the clouds is on the horizon and it draws ever closer with each passing day. And that, in truth, is what we anticipate more than anything else this Advent season: the promised Second Coming of Christ the King. And while we wait with the patience of God-given faith for that distant day, our Lord graciously feeds us with the substance of His promise even here and now. He feeds us with Himself. 6 To strengthen you toward the wait for His final advent on the horizon, our Lord comes to you presently, in this His sacramental advent, He comes to you currently from the paten and chalice, in, with, and under the form of the grainy host and the red wine, in body and blood for the forgiveness of every last one of your sins and for the sanctifying of your body and soul for life without end. The promise was fulfilled twenty centuries ago. The seed of Eve was born of Mary, only to lay dead in her heartbroken arms three decades on for the redemption of the world. And the promise will be fulfilled again when that Redeemer returns in the flesh to put an end to all pain, to wipe away all tears, and to make all things new. But the promise is further fulfilled right here, right now, in this room, between our Lord’s resurrection and our own, when and where the Son of God dwells bodily in the holy bread and wine, when and where the Messiah arrives on your own eager tongue, a personal advent for you individually, to bear you through the many burdens of this life and the overlong wait. So come now, dear children, the table is soon ready. Behold, your King is coming this day. Though He arrives lowly in this here bread and wine, He comes nonetheless as One just and having salvation. He once entered the holy city on a colt, on the foal of a donkey, and was welcomed triumphantly as royalty deserves. But then that King was betrayed, arrested, beaten, mocked, scourged, scorned, and executed, what we sinners ourselves had justly deserved. He selflessly took the wrath we wrought upon His own weakened body. But now He comes to you once more, lowly but ever just and having much salvation. He comes to you through the blood that once cascaded forth in a river of crimson from His pierced side. 7 That blood still fills the chalice at this altar. God’s pain once poured out on the cross is still poured out at this rail to alleviate your spiritual pain and to quench your thirst for eternity. So as He comes to you now, to save you, to strengthen you, to solidify you in your faith for your eternal fate, welcome Him rightly, receive Him reverently, as the denizens of that holy city of Jerusalem once did. Sing to Him as they once sang: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth; heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.” When we sing this highest hymn of all here in a moment, dear faithful, sing it like you truly mean it. The ancient promise given at the exile from paradise was once fulfilled at old Bethlehem in a manger and later outside the city walls of old Jerusalem on a crucifix. The ancient promise will be fulfilled again in the new Jerusalem in the consummation of the age. And the ancient promise is right now fulfilled in the hearts and on the lips of the saints of this new Bethlehem here in East Tennessee. Therefore, come now and be enlivened by Christ’s advent just for you in this holy meal. And always keep the hope and anticipation alive in your humble heart, until He comes again – and soon. In His most holy name. Amen.
0 Comments
Rev. Shemwell
1 Corinthians 15:20-28; Matthew 25:31-46 11/26/23 Homily for the Last Sunday of the Church Year In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And He will place the sheep on His right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave Me food, I was thirsty and you gave Me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed Me, I was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you visited Me, I was in prison and you came to Me.’ Then the righteous will answer the King, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? And when did we see You a stranger and welcome You, or naked and clothe You? And when did we see You sick or in prison and visit You?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it unto one of the least of these My brothers, you did it unto Me.’” Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, at the very end of time and in the consummation of the age the King will come again in glory as judge to separate the nations one from another as a shepherd separates his sheep from the goats. That is a fact. And as I have said in these previous weeks and even before that, none of us know exactly when – nor can we ever know the precise hour of the Last Judgment. But this much is certain: Jesus will come back, and soon. 2 And when He does come, the righteous will then be set apart from the unrighteous, the believing from the unbelieving, and in this divine division and sacred separation of sheep from goat, the fruits of faith, good works themselves, will be a most consequential source of evidence. And maybe that’s something that sort of bothers our Lutheran thinking a little bit. Though it shouldn’t. But before we get into all that, here is the first thing to observe this morning. Until the Last Day, for the present time, that is, the sheep and the goats, they are co-mingled and all mixed together. That is quite apparent from this final parable from our Lord, according to St. Matthew’s gospel, which is why a separation on the Last Day is necessary. To separate what is presently mixed. But we know this to be true as well from experience, don’t we? The congregation of believers, the visible church on earth, exists for the time being in the midst of the godless world, all mixed together. That has been the case since the very beginning and it will be a reality until the very end. And maybe the world will only become more godless in the meantime – that seems reasonable enough to assume by taking a look around. Yet there is more to the story though than just the indisputable fact that the church and the world stand opposed to one another. There is clearly a distinction to be made between the visible church on earth and the godless society which it inhabits, but the real distinction worth weighing here, the more meaningful distinction worth acknowledging from today’s parable, is that much broader distinction which exists beyond the borders of church walls, that distinction between the believing sheep on the one hand and the unbelieving goats on the other. And I’m afraid to say, that distinction is often rather blurred for us now, this side of heaven. It is not black and white, as it were, but a shade gray. 3 For instance, though it is troubling to admit, there are probably, for now, there are unbelievers in the pews of the visible Christian church, there are; just as there are true believers outside the walls of many Christian congregations. And most unfortunate of all perhaps, there are likely even unbelievers in the pulpits and seminary classrooms of some churches. No man can read the heart of another man. Not here below, anyhow. We aren’t given to know who has saving faith and who doesn’t. Only Christ can read hearts, not the laity, not the ordained. That task belongs solely to Jesus. And that is exactly what He will do on the Last Day – He will read the hearts of men and women, for their better or worse. But what is more, dear friends, is the unquestionable truth that neither can any mere mortal, any man or woman, determine his or her own fate by looking within his or her own heart. That’s just not how it works either. And that there, if you ask me, is the most significant takeaway from this Gospel reading and from this last Sunday of the church year. We can’t read the hearts of others, sure – but neither can we by ourselves determine the definite nature of our own hearts at times, at least not by looking within with our oh-so nearsighted vision as still fallen creatures. You see, when the average person reads this eschatological parable, this end-times parable from Matthew’s gospel chapter twenty-five, or hears it spoken aloud, they are usually quick to notice the obvious: the fact that the righteous sheep in the parable respond in quite a confused way to Christ’s suggestion that they have fed Him, quenched His thirst, welcomed, clothed, and visited Him. Right? 4 And most people understand this confused and uncertain response on the part of the righteous sheep in the parable to be a result of the fact that Christ is making a very profound point – that these things were not done unto Him directly over the course of a life, but rather that they were done unto the least of men, the lowliest among brothers, the average Joe, so to speak, and that they were only therethrough done unto Jesus in an indirect way. You see, the common and sensible interpretation is that Christ is saying He is in all men and women, to some extent, or at least He is represented in them, and so when a Christian serves his neighbor, whomever it may be, he is really unknowingly serving Christ. And that is absolutely correct, by the way. As I’ve said before, that is precisely how C.S. Lewis used to put it: your neighbor is a little Christ to you – whom you serve. Luther more or less said the same thing. So when we serve others, we serve the Lord in them. And hence the traditional interpretation of what Christ means here is entirely on point. The righteous serve Jesus through serving mankind, whether they realize it or not, particularly through serving the humblest among their neighbors, per our Lord’s specific words. So that’s all good and makes perfect sense. But here’s where I read this text slightly differently from others. I don’t so much believe that the righteous are confused in this parable because they do not recognize that they were really serving Christ all along in the least of their brothers and sisters. Instead, I believe that their confusion, uncertainty, and apparent ignorance is more so a result of the fact that they never once actually stopped to focus on their own good works for very long in such a way that they would even be able to remember them clearly – or would even be able to pinpoint them as the fruits of their own faith. Throughout their holy lives, that just wasn’t important to the righteous. That isn’t important to them. Their good works aren’t their own concern. They aren’t preoccupied with their own righteousness. 5 Which is what makes them truly righteous to begin with, you know? It is not so much that they do not remember serving Christ directly – though that is also accurate, obviously. But it is instead that they do not really remember serving their neighbor at all, because they do not cling to these good deeds in a showy and self-righteous way. They do not even see these good works as their own in the least. It was merely the Holy Spirit doing His work in and through them all throughout. So the righteous do not identify in a kind of prideful way with the good work of feeding, quenching, welcoming, clothing, and visiting others and Christ in them. For the righteous, all good works are God’s works, not their own. I cannot emphasize that enough, guys. The righteous are simply vessels for God’s righteous will and activity – and those who are righteous recognize that. And the lack of vain self- reflection and the absence of a conceited self-righteous emphasis on one’s own supposed charitable deeds is what makes the righteous righteous in the first place. Their humility makes them right and good in God’s eyes. The sheep on the Last Day are rewarded not for their works, not even for their fruits, but for their faith and the humble absence of self-righteousness in their hearts which is all a result of their genuine faith in God the Father, Son, and Spirit. Because they lack that corrupt sentiment of self-congratulation and self-praise, the righteous don’t linger on their service to one another in a desperate, works-righteousness sort of way. They don’t trust in their own efforts for their salvation. They only trust in the cross of Christ and in their God-given faith. And so on the Last Day, unsurprisingly, if you ask me, the righteous will be left wondering what Christ the King and Judge is even getting at: “Whose works are You talking about, Lord? Certainly not mine, for all good work comes from God, from You, never from me.” 6 And here’s why that matters for us right now, today, before the end. I told you last week that the fruits of your faith will be evidence of your faith on the day of judgment. And as we hear this morning, the Lord will separate the sheep from the goats, the believers from the unbelievers, based on this evidence. However, as I further told you a week ago, the fruits of your faith are never your own to claim. They don’t belong to you. They belong to God. They are godly fruits. And you are only God’s servant and messenger – a frail vessel for His overabundant goodness and mercy. Therefore, I beg you, dear flock: never look within for assurance of your salvation. Never look to your own deeds. Never question your faith or the goodness of your heart because you question the goodness of your works – or the seeming lack of good works altogether. And furthermore, whenever you do happen to do some good, for that matter, some sanctified deed, whatever it may be, don’t pat yourself on the back too much either. And for the love of God, do no announce your pious efforts to the rest of the world. Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing – and don’t let you yourself dwell too long on whatever good you happen to have done. Because self-righteousness and self- congratulation and self-praise undermine all the fruits of faith; these poisons charity and distort all loving action – and sinners will indeed be held accountable for these things on the Last Day. Arguably nothing at all is grosser in this fallen world than self- righteousness – than talking about how good you are and how much good you’ve reportedly done, rather than the one true God. That is just downright disgusting. I don’t know how else to put it. So do not look within. Because there’s only danger there. There’s only the remaining sinful nature to be found and to be confounded by. You see, here’s the thing: whatever good is in us is not us – it is solely the Holy Spirit working on us and through us poor, miserable sinners. 7 Put simply, dear friends: do your absolute best to refrain from keeping a tally of your good labors and virtuous endeavors. Do not obsess over whom you’ve served, whom you’ve fed, whose thirst you’ve quenched, or whom you’ve welcomed, clothed, or visited. Serve other people for their sake, for Christ’s sake, not for the sake of feeling good about yourself. And certainly never be eager or overly anxious to tell another soul about your worthy efforts. Because your salvation does not lie in those efforts. It lies instead right here, in the baptismal font. That is where assurance is located – and that is something worth sharing with your neighbor. Holy Baptism and its free salvation for you. Your salvation is to be found right here – and in the words of Holy Absolution spoken Sunday after Sunday, and in the Lord Christ’s physical body and blood consumed from this altar rail. That is where your salvation is to be discovered – without exception. Not within you, but outside of you. Salvation is not found here [points to chest] but here [points to font and altar], in this place. Looking inward only ever causes you to doubt and question the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit – or worse, it leads to claim His work as your own. It leads you to plagiarize the Spirit. For those who proudly preach works-righteousness, those who falsely accuse us Lutherans of antinomianism, of being against the law and of being proponents of so-called cheap grace, those who earnestly focus so much on the most superficial transgressions, social transgressions, by the way, man-made transgressions which often aren’t really even sins at all and yet those who then leave their neighbor out in the cold day after day and who are pent up with resentment, self-certainty, self- congratulation, and self-praise, all those pietists and puritans wheresoever they are, all they really have to boast about at the end of the day is a total lack of faith and trust in the Holy Spirit. It’s true. 8 But all we need – all you need, beloved, is faith in God. Sola fide – “faith alone” in the Latin. We Lutherans take that dreadfully seriously. All you need is faith. The Holy Spirit will do the rest of the work, rest assured. Anyone who tells you otherwise is twisting Scripture and deforming doctrine and misleading you. Yes, the fruits of your faith will be evidence on the Last Day, but if you really and truly believe that the Spirit works through means, through the Word and Sacraments and through believing Christians, through their holy lives, through their witness, through their hands and feet, without any merit or worthiness in them, then you don’t need to waste a moment of your life or your time keeping an account of your own good works. In fact, after you’ve done any good whatsoever, be sure to let it go and forget it forever. Don’t cling to it in the least. For whenever you cling to it, it quickly loses its good nature and becomes tainted by your lingering sinfulness and your iniquitous desire for acclaim and glory from others. I know, because sadly I speak from experience. Because I am a hypocrite sometimes. Again, any truly good works to be had aren’t even ours to begin with. They don’t belong to us. So just have a simple faith instead; just have faith that God accomplishes His will for you and through you, His passive vessel, and don’t concern yourself with the end or with your faith’s eventual evidence. Yes, I am telling you once more not to worry about the Last Day and the Final Judgment. You are here, are you not? You are in the sheepfold already, within the sheepgate, you are receiving the gracious gifts of God, you are being fed and sanctified in body and soul, you are the Shepherd’s sheep. Plain and simple. Therefore, fret not about works. Good works will without doubt flow out of you naturally and indeed involuntarily sometimes, for the fruits of faith always follow from it. 9 As a righteous sheep of the Good Shepherd though, you must never concern yourself with the good you have done but on the contrary you should instead worry about all the good that’s left undone. And there’s plenty. So concentrate on that instead. And if you do, with a humble heart, then when Christ finally does return in His glory you will be able to ask Him with a perfect contrite faith: “But when on earth did I do any good, Lord? Was it not You, dear Christ, all along Who did only good and the only good, and Who occasionally worked some small benefit for others through my painfully weak flesh? You, Lord, hungered in the wilderness for forty days. You thirsted on the cross. You were rejected by Your people and left unwelcomed, You were arrested and imprisoned without a visitor in the world, and Yours were those clothes torn apart and left to the lots – it was You Who were hung naked outside the city walls and left to die, so that through Your death You might destroy death itself, that last enemy of all. I have not served You a single day, but rather You have served me for a lifetime – for an eternity even – from the very foundation of the world – and You are the One Who has served my needful neighbor through me time and again and so often without my knowledge or even against my fallen will. So to Your name be all the glory and never mine. Let Your name be praised forever and ever.” Yes, these will be the words of those proven righteous on the Last Day. These will be your modest, humble, deferential words, dear saints. And I cannot wait to hear them myself. In closing, Christ says in Matthew chapter six: “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.” Yes, the hypocrites already have their reward here in this brief life. The goats have the trash of this godless world to feed on. 10 But on the Last Day, those goats will be without help, for they lack all faith and trust in the Spirit. The sheep, on the other hand, those of us here in the flock, who sound no trumpet when we do good, we seek not the approval or praise of others, especially not the esteem of this broken world. Because we know that good only comes from God above, never from us. It is one-directional and has only one source. And even when some good does just so happen to happen through our meek and terribly weak hands and feet, all the glory nevertheless belongs to God alone. For we are only His vessels, His hands and feet here below. As the Good Shepherd’s sheep, our reward, though, it has yet to come. The hypocrites have their reward, but ours is still on the horizon. Our eternal reward is not yet here. But I promise You: He is coming soon. Our reward, Christ, the everlasting Sabbath, is coming very soon. So prepare yourself by clinging not to your own works but to His final work, and to that God-given faith worked for you by the Spirit in your Holy Baptism. Keep ready by returning to this place week by week. By receiving God’s free gifts. By prayer and thanksgiving. And through these necessary things, you will most certainly be blessed without end by the Father in heaven. All so that on the last day of all Christ the King Himself will be able to say to you individually, His beloved sheep: “Come now, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” In the holy name of the coming King and Judge of all things, in the name of our precious Lord, Jesus. Amen. Rev. Shemwell
Matthew 25:14-30 11/19/23 Homily for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, faith always produces its fruits. That is a sure fact of the holy Christian life. Those fruits proper to our faith always proceed from it. If there is saving faith, then good works, or the fruits of faith, are sure to be found sooner or later. Those works themselves, however good they may be, they never save us, of course – only God-given faith and Holy Baptism save. But as we will hear next weekend in our Gospel text on the Sheep and the Goats, those fruits suited and belonging to our faith will indeed be, on the Last Day, evidence of our faith. So yes, good works invariably follow from faith. Whereas useless and futile works flow out from unbelief. And that is ultimately the message of our Gospel this morning – that is the Parable of the Talents in a nutshell. Now friends, I beg you: do not read this lesson today as if it were an economic instruction or some sort of defense of capitalism or the Protestant work ethic or whatever other materialistic interpretation. That’s not what our reading is all about. Instead, it primarily concerns faith and fruits, gifts and growth, as it were. Those who manage the master’s property and talents—with a talent here being the equivalent of at least $10,000 or more in today’s dollars—but anyhow, those who manage the master’s property and talents well in our parable do so because they have faith in the character and the graciousness of their master. But on the other hand, the one unfaithful servant who buries his master’s talent deep in the ground does so because he lacks all faith in his master’s magnanimous identity – in his master’s benevolence – which is to say, he lacks faith in who his master really is. The faithless servant has no genuine fear, love, and trust with respect to the one whom he serves, he has no bona fide belief in his heart, which is finally made evident in that one single talent 2 unearthed and proven embarrassingly barren and the source of a disastrous disappointment. He who has faith has holy works, full stop; and he who has none works only evil and iniquity from the standpoint of eternity. That’s the message. But here’s the thing: even the faithful servants in our lesson, their works and fruits are not actually their own to claim. They did not begin with any talents of their own or with any of their own property to manage, did they? No, it all belonged to the master from the very start. It was merely on loan to them – or they were simply stewards, so to speak, for a period of time. So whatever good they were eventually able to do while the master was away was only made possible because of what was first given to them freely before the master ever even left. And that, friends, is where faith truly begins: with the full acknowledgement that nothing on earth belongs to us or is ours to claim. Not ourselves, not our lives, not our bodies nor our souls, not our things, not our faith, and certainly not the fruits of faith, not even our good works. All these are but gifts from God the Father, given as good and perfect gifts from above through God the Son, and worked in us patiently by God the Spirit. Do you want to know what this parable is really all about? It is about what God has given you and what you then do with what God has given you. Do you recognize, dear flock, that everything you have and everything you’ve accomplished so far in your life and everything that you are comes from God alone? It comes not from within you, but from without you. God is the sole source of all beneficial and valuable things. At the end of the day, not a solitary thing really belongs inherently to you – but it all belongs to Him – and it is therefore owed back to Him. Now the question is: do you accept that reality in humble faith? And does the life you live reflect that indisputable truth? Do you give back to God what once without question came from Him? Are you generous with you time, with your resources, with your personal talents? Do you 3 render unto God what is rightly His? Or… do you occasionally bury these things deep in the figurative ground, within the pit of your own pride and the grave of your greed, as if somehow you are going to be able to take them with you when you are someday interred there in the earth too? You can’t, by the way. You can’t take out of this life what you came into it lacking. You cannot carry out of this world what never belonged to you to begin with. And those aren’t my words of counsel and warning, but those of St. Paul himself from his first epistle to St. Timothy chapter six. As ever, Paul pulls no punches. We came with nothing, we bring nothing, we are but beggars, as Luther says, and we leave with nothing. You know, one of the most despicable human sentiments in this life is resentment or envy. When we think that others have been given more than they deserve – or more honestly and accurately, when we think that they’ve been given what we have deserved more. Maybe when you first heard this parable you initially felt a little uneasy about the seeming unequal distribution of talents and responsibilities and rewards, for that matter. Maybe it didn’t seem fair to you. Maybe it appeared unjust that more is given to those who have in the end and then taken away from those who already lack. After all, that is a natural response for sinful, entitled human beings. But that wicked emotion and frustration only arises from the wickedest notion of all: which is the thought that anything is ours in the first place – or that we are owed anything at all other than temporal and eternal punishment. True faith depends on an inner, spiritual as well as a bodily awareness of utter dependence and complete vulnerability before our Creator and His grace. Every day, every breath, every break, every meal, every rest, every love, every reward, every smile, every moment of peace, every pleasure and profit and measure of progress, it is all a free gift, given from a gracious heavenly hand to one entirely undeserving. So in light of all that, let the following reality be your first thought each and every morning, 4 beloved: I have earned none of this, I have deserved none of this, and yet my God is so good and so merciful that He grants it all to me nonetheless. Gratitude is the surest antidote to envy and covetousness and jealousy and resentment. So why not give it a shot? Embed that little spoken confession into your morning routine. We are nothing without and apart from what God has given and made us. Of course, it must be said here as well that God does not only give blessings in the form of things and resources. He also gives us skills, talents, abilities. You owe God your time and resources, your effort and tithe, to be sure, but you moreover owe Him your unique contribution as a gifted person. Think of those who manage the property here at Bethlehem, or who play the organ and join in the ensemble and bell choir, who interpret my lengthy sermons, who handle the financial matters of the church, who shepherd our youth, who offer up their time to the altar guild, who themselves assist here at the sacred altar as acolytes and crucifers, lectors and elders, and who fix pastor’s car, for example – you see, all these are just as much talents which are to be rendered unto God with and through His holy church. As such, I encourage more of you to get involved – especially those new to our church. Every single one of you can help this congregation in some way, shape, or form. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking you have nothing to contribute. That is not a sign of humility but of idleness and indifference. No, you have much to add to our work here – and we desperately need you and your input. Don’t let the same few dozen parishioners do everything forever. I very much encourage you each one of you to get involved. And with this encouragement is an important reminder: the talented help you offer here is not simply a selflessly philanthropic donation from you to the church and therethrough to God, but it is rather you simply fulfilling a fundamental responsibility you have as a recipient of the already plenteous gifts of God. Again, 5 everything is His. We are His. And not solely on Sundays, but every day. Don’t forget that. Now to the surprise of many, I am sure, the takeaway for this twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost is short and sweet and to the point: be a faithful servant and steward of what God has given you. Be fruitful, be engaged, be openhanded and charitable. But also, don’t ever lose sight of what this place is all about. When we gather here together, it is not about what we do in the least, but it is instead a matter of what God has done and continues to do for us. He has given us so much, and so many talents at that, yet He further proceeds to give lavishly and ceaselessly and without respect to our profound unworthiness. The church year will come to a close a week from today. Hard to believe, but a new year is nearly upon us. Next weekend on the last Sunday of the church year we will be reminded once more of our Lord’s imminent return in glory to judge the earth. However, as St. Paul implies in our epistle today, when it comes to that final return, we believers have nothing at all to worry about. We belong to the day not the night, we walk in the light never the darkness, we are presently perfectly prepared. And that is because we are already here, in the one, holy, Christian and apostolic church. We assemble weekly to receive that which strengthens our saving faith and sanctifies our souls for judgment and readies our bodies for the life to come. God mounted a shameful cross long ago in order that His blood willingly-shed might cover our sinful nature and our untold transgressions. And so it has. The water that flowed out of His pierced side bathed you clean in your baptism – what was once scarlet is now white as now. And insofar as you repent, you remain forgiven. And the blood that gushed out of that gash in His godly belly still fills the holy chalice right here, a cup overflowing to quench your thirst for life everlasting. Therefore, come be 6 enlivened in this meal once again. Take what you need from this altar rail. Let it fill you up. And then depart in peace to serve your Master dutifully. He will be here soon in this divine banquet. And then He’ll be here soon, descending on the clouds in glory as divine judge at the end of time. Or maybe, should it come first, He’ll be here soon to carry you home when you breathe your last, to your divine resting place. Either way and until then, let your faith be full and fruitful. So that when He comes for His glory or for your own, you might be blessed to hear those heartening, most gladdening words of all: “Well done, My good and faithful servant.” In the holy name of Jesus. Amen. Rev. Shemwell
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 11/12/23 Homily for The 24th Sunday after Pentecost Our sermon text this morning is the lectionary reading from St. Paul’s first epistle to the church in Thessalonica. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.” Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, what we hear in these prominent words from St. Paul is a description of the end of this present world – the end of earth as we know it really and then what comes thereafter. And yet, the apostle explicitly tells us at the close of our reading to “encourage one another with these words.” That’s the thing, friends: the end is not something to fear, but something to look forward to. It is not something to fret over, but something to anticipate with immense joy. It is something which itself encourages. Our Lord will return in judgement, yes. But for those of faith, for us, that’s good news. We are reckoned righteous for His sake. And as we heard last week, when our Lord, the holy Lamb, does return, He will wipe away our tears and end our pain and He will make all things new. For us that is perfection. That’s what we want. That is what we desire – it is our deepest longing as sinner-saints to be wholly rescued from this bitter vale of tears. But yes, to be sure, for the unbeliever though, the end of the present world is perhaps a terror – and a terrible thing to contemplate. News of it is received by the faithless with a tremendous deal of trepidation. 2 Yet it shouldn’t be that way. Instead, this news should be regarded by them foremost as a welcomed warning. And that’s exactly what St. Paul intends here. His words are an encouragement to us and a warning of sorts to those still lost. His is a message of hope and of good tidings for us faithful, but it is moreover, in a less direct way, still a message of hope and salvation through God’s freely-given-grace for all outside these walls as well, should they only believe. And that means it is imperative that we share this message with all who remain lost. That is our duty as Christians. It is absolutely incumbent upon us. The unbelieving world needs the saving Christian faith, it is their only hope, and it is our responsibility to speak it to them, and regularly. So that’s what must be said up front. You already know it to be true – but I am obliged to remind you often as your pastor. Because the truth is, we Christians have gotten kind of lazy and awfully apathetic in this department over the past half century or so. But anyhow, let’s back up for a moment, shall we? There’s something else to be said here for us. This current world will come to an end. True enough. It will be destroyed, in fact. There will be a conflagration, as Sts. Peter and Paul both assure us. Jesus will return as Judge. He said so Himself. This is certain; the Bible straightforwardly tells us so. All the pieces of the puzzle fit together and make sense. But what exactly will the end look like though? That is the question on the minds of many people. And one can understand why. Maybe it’s on all our minds as of late. So let’s begin to answer this pressing question by starting here, as usual, with a single word: ἁρπαγησόμεθα (harpogay-sow-metha) – from the Greek verb ἁρπάζω – meaning to seize, to snatch up, or to carry off. That’s the word Paul uses when referring to what will happen to those still living when the Lord comes back. They will be seized and caught up in the heavens to be united with God forever. 3 Now the Latin Vulgate, the primary edition and rendering of Holy Scripture from its original languages that held sway for many, many centuries, translates this Greek word as rapiemur (rah-pih-aye-mur), from rapio in the Latin, meaning to snatch away or to grab, or to capture or catch – hence: “they will be caught up,” right? That’s what Paul writes. But okay, pastor, what’s your point though? Why bring in more Greek this Sunday and now even Latin? Well, here’s my point, friends: etymologically- speaking, this little word in the Bible is where we English speakers get a very serious and well-known theological term: rapture – again, from the Latin rapio. So will there be a rapture? Yes, of course, St. Paul says so. Those still living will be caught up with Christ and the saints in the clouds on the Last Day. They will be raptured, so to speak. However, much of what people in America today think about when they hear the word “rapture” is actually kind of inaccurate and confused. The Left Behind series of books, for instance, have you ever heard of it before? I’m sure you have. But here’s what you need to know about it: the theological thinking in that series is, to be blunt, and honestly, to be charitable, it is downright unbiblical. The author’s incredibly speculative understanding of the rapture has no real foundation in God’s Word and its historical interpretation. Having said that though, this view is also incredibly popular these days. Many evangelicals are convinced, for example, of an initial rapture, followed by a literal seven-year tribulation, with a-specific-and- singular-yet-so-far-undetermined-and-rather-frightening Antichrist figure, and a one- thousand year or millennial reign of Christ prior to the Final Judgment. Yet as far as God has revealed it to us in His holy and inspired Word, none of this speculation is really true or certain or at least proven or even provable. And the church in her profound wisdom for eighteen hundred years understood that fact perfectly well. She was not blind to symbolic and figurative readings of books like St. John’s Revelation. And neither are we. 4 Unfortunately though, a few short centuries ago a handful of Protestants began rather blindly to teach something new and positively uncertain concerning the end times. And regrettably, many people today have been led astray by these false teachings – which is what they are, by the way: false teachings. This matters for us this Sunday for two important reasons: firstly, because that’s the reading for today – 1 Thessalonians 4 – arguably one of the primary scriptural reference passages for those who teach incorrectly about the end times; and secondly, because of what is going on in the world right now, especially in the Middle East. This discussion is perhaps particularly pertinent in light of what has gone on with, say, Iran in the last week or so, right? The World War 3 worries are making the rounds once again. And to be candid with you, we do very much live in a dangerous time. There is global concern, and rightly so. But according to some Christians in this country who hold to a minority view called dispensational premillennialism—don’t worry, we will get into that dense terminology in Bible Study this morning, so make sure not to miss it!—but anyhow, some well-intentioned among the faithful who believe this peculiar teaching argue that the modern state of Israel plays a significant role in the one-thousand-year or millennial reign spoken of in Revelation chapter twenty. So for these Christians—who while vocal are relatively few—Christ’s Second Coming as Final Judge is in a way predicated on, it is based, contingent, and dependent on a national restoration of the political state of Israel. Which is why Christian Zionism is so prevalent among so many evangelicals and conservative Christians. But here’s the thing; as far as we know, that understanding of the end times is simply not scripturally substantiated in the least or even sensible. Which is to say, it is really quite unbiblical as well. 5 For us traditional Christians, for us Lutherans, for our theology and for our eschatology, from the Greek word ἔσχατον, meaning “the last thing,” with eschatology being the study of the last things, so in other words, for our understanding of the Second Coming and the Final Judgment, the very last things of all—modern nations and geopolitical matters are ultimately irrelevant. And besides, as Scripture plainly states, the holy church of Christ is the new and now only Israel in God’s eyes. God’s chosen people are the Christian church. That’s been the reality since Jesus Christ’s tomb was found empty two thousand years ago. The church, the body of believers, we are God’s chosen. Those baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are God’s chosen. Not modern Israelis or religious Jews or Muslim Palestinians or Iranians or anyone else on earth, but we Christians everywhere. Period. We as the baptized are the chosen. A Christian baptism is how God now chooses His people, after all. Furthermore, when our Lord does return, it will be all at once. It will not be two separate events, with an initial rapture of the faithful, as spoken of in our reading this morning, and then thereafter a Second Coming in judgment later on, with a tribulation of sorts in between. Despite what some misled believers think, there will not be two separate events at all, but one return, one Second Coming, all at once at the very end. It is the Second Coming after all, not the third or the second and a half coming. And when Jesus does come at the end of the age, once and for all, He will then judge all people, without exception – which means that all who have rejected Him explicitly will then be rejected by Him explicitly. That is what the Holy Bible teaches. And that is what the church has believed for thousands of years. And we have got to be bold in our proclamation of this pure doctrine of the faith, even when it is unwelcome and evidently out of season and maybe even unpopular among those who share our politics. 6 There will be a rapture, yes. But it won’t be like what you generally hear about in so much modern theological conversation in this part of the world. It will be, according to the Bible, an immediate thing, not a drawn-out ordeal. And the success or failure of the modern state of Israel, or any nation, for that matter, including our own, will play no determining role whatsoever in whether or when or how Jesus returns as judge in His glory. That’s up to Him. Not us. It has nothing to do with our thoughts, opinions, or deeds. So in light of all that, in light of the Lutheran and historical Christian teaching on this consequential issue, here’s my pastoral advice to you today – my sincerest words of encouragement: don’t listen to all that noise out there. Don’t pay heed to the fearmongers and false teachers and the end-timers who spread lies or at least loose and lazy interpretations about the Last Day. The end will come, but nobody knows when. Not a single solitary soul. There will be signs, for sure, but no man or woman this side of glory will ever know the exact when. And nobody really knows what exactly it will look like either. That is not given for us to know. And that’s okay. But anyone who tries to convince you otherwise, who thinks they’ve got it all figured out, is purely pulling the wool over your eyes. And honestly, they are disobeying God as well by attempting to shape dogma and doctrine out of sheer speculation. But here’s the most important takeaway: don’t worry so much about the end. Don’t be like them. Don’t be consumed with what God in His infinite wisdom has chosen not to reveal to you. Don’t brood or panic or lose any sleep over this world’s end. We are here right now, this day, and someday the end will come – but no one on earth knows when or how. Maybe it’ll be soon. Maybe it won’t. And you know what, we are truly in the end times already, we have been in the end times for two millennia, but we don’t know when the end times will finally end. 7 We don’t know and we can’t know. So in the meantime, how about just share the Gospel, save whomever you can. Focus on that. And don’t spend another moment of your brief life concerned about the specifics of the end of the world. God doesn’t want you too. Neither do I. And your worry makes no difference anyhow. Because obviously, worrying does not do anything at all to prepare you or anyone else for the consummation of the age. You know that and I know that. So again, tune out all that noise and just relax. But how on earth can you be so calm, pastor? How can you recommend such a light-hearted perspective? The world’s gonna end in a fiery destruction. Doesn’t that bother you? No, dear faithful, it does not. Because it is God’s will and His will is always good and because everyone saved in Christ is eternally secure in Him, and when the day does come, we will all then be ushered into the new creation and the new heavens. The end is not scary. It is sublime. And I cannot wait for it, frankly. I am not worried or worked up one bit. Days are dark right now, I get it. I have eyes to see and ears to hear. And yeah, look at how awful things around us seem. The world is indeed in turmoil. I wouldn’t deny that. And don’t get me wrong, I do very much fear for those who are still lost to this pagan world. But my worry and fear, none of that stuff helps them in the least. All I can do is share the Gospel with them, day by day. And if you are concerned for them, too, then do that also. Share the Word with your unbelieving loved ones whenever you have the opportunity. But don’t bother them with nonsense about when the world is going to end or precisely how. That is utterly useless to them. Instead, give them the full sweetness of the Gospel, give them the news of that forgiveness won through Christ’s beautiful bloodshed. Give them the news that when God incarnate returns, He will bring life wherever there is death. That is what persuades and that is what saves. Therefore, give them that – which is all they really need at the end of the day anyways. Law and Gospel – and in that order. 8 And what about us though? What do we have to do in order to prepare for the end? Well, again, stop worrying yourself. Chill out. Relax. All you need to do is keep coming to church. Keep believing. Keep praying. Keep reading your Bible. Keep hearing the Word preached out loud in this here place. Keep receiving the holy sacraments of Absolution and the Lord’s Supper. Keep loving your family. Keep making families, as a matter of fact. Great big families. Be fruitful and multiply – the more the merrier, the more souls to save. And keep educating and catechizing your dear children, so that they might be sanctified, too. Keep serving and growing your church. Keep helping your neighbor. And you know what else you really need to do? You need to enjoy your life every now and again. As much as you can. Keep enjoying this gift of God’s green earth and your precious life. That’s right, enjoy your life. Drink and be merry. The wise king Solomon got it so right in the Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter eight: “I commend enjoyment,” he writes, “because a man has nothing better under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry.” Enjoy this life without shame. Suck the marrow out of it as Henry David Thoreau once poetically suggested. Seize the day even. Live your life to the fullest. Obey God, of course – that goes without saying. And that is how you live your life to the fullest. But also, remember all the commandments – the fullness thereof. Keep all the usual biblical commandments, naturally. Yet recall, too, that God further commands us to rejoice, to be glad, to savor this life and His gracious gift of creation and providence. The Son of God straight up told us time and again not to worry, not to be anxious. So obey Him. For the love of God—and I mean that quite literally—listen to your Lord and trust Him. Live your life without dread and angst. Love your life deeply and intently. 9 That’s how you prepare for Christ’s Second Coming. By respecting Him enough in appreciating your eternal salvation and your earthly life now, both of which are treasures from the Heavenly Father, which are safeguarded through His Son and worked in us and sustained by His Spirit. According to a famous tale—an often-told although perhaps apocryphal, unverified tale—a friend once asked Martin Luther what he would do if he knew that the world was going to end tomorrow. A question familiar to us all. And you know what Dr. Luther supposedly said? He said in response to that grave question that he would plant a little apple tree. That’s how he would spend his final day on this earth. Planting a tree. Being about his business by being a good steward of what God gave him, by not worrying, and by tending to what he loved: the earth and his neighbor. Whatever is going on in the world right now, however devastating it may appear, and terrifying at times, it is in God’s hands. All you can do is pray that His will be done. Our speculations do not factor into the Last Day. And neither does any paranoia our part. The Final Judgement is not something to be paranoid and petrified about. It is good news. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: heaven is not the final destination, friends. It is not the end goal. Heaven is wonderful and blissful and perfect and it is an altogether incomparable and celestial waiting room – but note well that that is what it is: a place where we await the Last Day. The real goal, the true end, is the new creation, the new heavens, the New Jerusalem, all that which comes after the Final Judgment at the end of time and after the conflagration, that fiery destruction of this current world. Our salvation is concentrated on eternity. We’re headed forward forever. And really, our eternity with Christ and with all the saints together begins on the Last Day, when we will each be resurrected in body and soul. And that’s something to look forward to with great expectation. It is not bad news but the very best news. 10 So my closing advice to you is this: turn off the news. In fact, just the turn off the television entirely, won’t you? And go read the Bible. Go outside. Go plant a tree. Read your Bible outside – and out loud. Kiss your children. Come to church week after week. And enjoy whatever time you have left on this planet. That’s how you prepare for the rapture. That’s how you make yourself ready for the Last Day. By being a good Christan on this given day – which means, in part, by rejoicing continually. Are you baptized, beloved? Are you here in church at this very moment? Are you repentant of your sins? Do you desire forgiveness and the Lord’s Supper? Do you love your neighbor? If so, then you have nothing in the world to worry about. You are saved eternally. Take heart and rejoice in that. The only thing that really matters in the end is already a settled matter for you now. It was decided on the cross long ago. So you are well on your way to being fully prepared for your Lord’s glorious return. We pray He comes quickly, of course, because the end is but a triumphant new beginning. So come quickly, Lord Jesus. Yet in the meantime, while we are waiting here below, don’t be anxious, brothers and sisters. That is a waste of time. Instead, spend your time well – by sharing the Gospel and enjoying the life God has granted you. That’s the work you have before you. And I hope you’ll take that work seriously by living light-heartedly – which is, after all, how a good, faithful Christian ought to live: without pretension and paranoia, without self-righteousness and self-certainty, without the heavy burden of useless worry, and with a healthy, robust lust for life. In the holy name of Jesus. Amen. Rev. Shemwell
Various texts 11/5/23 Homily for All Saints In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew; a formula, a phrase remains—but the best is lost. The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love—they are gone. They are gone on to feed the roses. Elegant and curled is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom, I know. But I do not approve. More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave. Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave, I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, these poetic words belong to the late, great Greenwich Village lyricist, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Despite her fiercest protestations against the grave though, she, too, fell victim to mortal fate almost three-quarters of a century ago now. She was sainted and lowered six feet down and green grass now covers her resting place. But her ardent words live on. I quote them this morning because they perfectly capture my own deepest feeling and sentiment so incredibly well. There is nothing in this life I detest more than death. I am not resigned to die, dear friends. In my nature, I don’t approve of it at all. Not one bit. Rather I am very much resolved not to die and never to fade away. 2 And yet when I do die someday, when it is my time to go, it will not be that I yielded myself to death, but rather that my human fate as a poor miserable sinner shall have killed me; so also to quote the Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: “I will not abdicate from life — instead, life will be wrested from me.” But even with all this passion to live and lust for life, I, too, like all men before me, will eventually succumb to my pitiful fate and I shall die. I don’t want to, but I will. If my Lord returns not first, I will pass away, as will everyone I have ever loved. As will my darling girls. As will you, dear flock. And how so many of my beloveds have already gone on to feed the roses. And presumably yours as well. All Saints is a feast day when we remember all who have fallen asleep in the Lord, those known to us, along with the many unknown. We remember and commemorate every single saint this holy day, from the dawn of time until now – but no doubt our remembrance is strongest and our commemoration simplest for those closest to us. We are each born, thrown naked into this broken world, and if we’re lucky we get almost a hundred years of life during which to cherish it, with all its strangeness and imperfection. But what was wrought in the garden from the very beginning still haunts our fate. For us each, a loamy grave is our future reality, an impartial destination in indiscriminate soil. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But what is perhaps worse than that somber fate is the fact that throughout this life we live we are forced to watch those dearest to us pass on ahead of us. We watch the life leave from them sometimes. We observe the zeal dissipate from their once-fervent eyes and their characteristic color drain pale. We see six of their closest friends lower them into the ground six feet beneath. We witness the diversity of blossoms and blooms blanket their florescent casket and handfuls of dirt serve as a sad so long. And that hurts so very much. How could it not? The living are always more perturbed by death than the dead, and maybe even than by the dying. 3 Because it pains us immensely to have to say goodbye knowing full well that we’ll be stuck here, left behind, on our own and well aware that most every goodbye is demanded in the most unresolved kind of way. Yet a voice from heaven once said: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.” And of course, the psalmist King David once sang: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” But dear faithful, what could possibly be blessed and precious about so horrid a destiny as death? Through it a soul is lost to the world and many more are left to linger in grief, sorrow, and uncertainty. How is that a blessing? How exactly is that precious to our God? What good is there in an unwelcome farewell? What sweetness in something so bitter to taste? But that’s the thing, beloved. The questioning itself reveals the problem. My curious questioning to you this morning from this lofty pulpit reveals the trouble plainly. The only reason I so often despise death is because I am still so unbearably weak in faith. Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief! You know, it is entirely fair what wise men say, that funerals are not about the dead but about the living. True enough. But death itself is not about the living but about the dead. Yes, I miss my Big Mamma, my Abuelita, my friends lost too soon to car wrecks and overdoses and suicides. But it isn’t about me though. And it isn’t about you either. That’s what we have to realize, however uncomfortable it is to realize. Those souls don’t belong to me, and neither do they belong to you – no, they belong to God alone. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” as St. Paul assures us. But since I cannot yet see the other side, I therefore struggle and doubt in times of sadness and despair. I hope, but it isn’t given for me to touch and to bear witness to the rest of the story for the time being, thus my hope occasionally falters. 4 Regardless of all that though, it is nevertheless certain and definite that our dear sainted family and friends right now rest from the labors in the Lord, in a hall of eternal roses of every holy hue, where they speak continually with their sweet Jesus. I cannot see it clearly here under heaven, for my eyes are far too frail, and so I do mourn at times. I admit it. But in the depth of my baptized heart, I do know that heaven is a fact. That hall of roses is real. And that is what I must concentrate on – not on my own disgust at death, but on where such a disgusting destiny ultimately leads: and that’s home. Death leads beyond itself and on home to Jesus. This very day, our loved ones who have died in the faith rest peacefully in God somewhere. Holy Scripture confirms it and comforts us time and again with its sureness. And we need that sureness. We have to have that encouragement in order to carry on. Otherwise, the compounded loss of life in this life would be too overwhelming, much too much to bear for us fragile sinners. But there is more, brothers and sisters. The saints do now rest in Jesus, that is true and encouraging enough, but one of these days, they’ll be raised as well, awaked from their quiet graves – and oh what a glorious day that shall be. We’ll all be raised. Right where we laid to rest our grandparents and parents and partners and friends and yes, sometimes even own children, right there – they’ll be raised from right there in that spot – from a bed of roses by the power of a cross stained crimson. Our Lord tells us in our gospel today to rejoice and be glad, for our reward is great in heaven. He would know better than any, for as the multitudes in white robes once guaranteed St. John in his vision: “Salvation belongs to the Lamb!” The Lamb has already gone on to prepare a place for us, that is unquestionable. And one of these days, when He at last appears again to carry us on home, we will then be exactly like Him, for we shall then see Him as He truly is. 5 This John likewise recorded for our benefit and for the sake of our hope. Our Redeemer will return and raise all us saints to new and eternal life. The Lamb will be our shepherd, He will guide us to those springs of living water, and He will wipe away every tear from our eyes. No more death, nor mourning, nor crying, nor pain, for the former things will have passed away – with all things made new. These promises are made to us this feast day and will be kept until the consummation of the age. These promises are now granted and given to the living, to bear us through this valley of the shadow of death, this vale of tears. “Blessed are those who mourn,” our Lord promises in declaration in His sermon on the mount, “for they shall be comforted.” Indeed, we shall. Indeed, we are. Every name we read today in our prayer, each one of them will be resurrected on the Last Day. And every body and soul present in this room now will be raised with them. Death was forever defeated on a tree of agony and angst at that place of the skull many centuries ago. Death still hurts the living, to be sure, it hounds and haunts us; but for the dead, death is nothing at all, thanks to the suffering of Christ and the cruciform death of God Himself. On account of that mighty and monumental sacrifice, death no longer has a victory of its own. It has no lasting sting anymore. It is but a momentary aching for us this side of glory – but for the dead, it is a victory already had. For us it stings and seems so terribly conclusive, yet in truth, it is nothing less than a consecrated portal for the saints of every age, leading them back to the bosom of God. For none truly die in the Lord, they only sleep for a little while. Now I must confess, I despise and detest and hate that sleep sometimes. Because from my petty human perspective, it seems so final, so permanent, so unlike sleep. I don’t yet get to see the light in their eyes once again, and so I deplore that much-deserved rest for the saints and save for it my scorn. 6 But the Word regardless consoles me in my doubt. Death is only temporary. Whereas life in Christ is everlasting. It is right and just then to pity the living, not the dead in the Lord. For they are at peace. And thankfully, fortunately, our God is gracious and merciful with those of little faith like myself. He grants us a glimpse of what’s next, even here, even now. In a few moments’ time, you will each ascend these steps and kneel at this altar rail. And when you commune here together with Jesus and with your fellow brothers and sisters in the faith, just know that there is a much greater multitude in heaven with whom you also feast and dine. All the saints partake of this host and this chalice along with you. Your spouse, your parents, your children, your friends, all who died in Christ commune with you in this place. They are up here, right next to you, participating in and savoring this foretaste of the Lamb’s high feast. Just because you cannot see them or feel their familiar touch does not make it any less certain and sure. It is a fact – just believe it. It is biblical – only trust it. It is the truth – so let yourself have hope and take heart, I urge you. Your saints are no less here today than God Himself. We don’t remember them and commemorate the saints this feast day from a distance. Hardly. We remember them instead while in their very midst, while communing with those blessed and precious dead who died in the Lord, while resting for a moment with them ourselves, shoulder to shoulder, reclining in that otherworldly hall of roses, next to our Jesus. That is what happens at this rail, Sunday after Sunday. The finality of death and the pain of loss are undone or at least numbed for a brief period of time while you rest on your knees before the Body and Blood of God. You are invited to feel that relief, to relish in that respite from your sorrow, dear friends. 7 You know, I loathe and abhor death but only because I am admittedly so very weak. Nonetheless, my patient Lord forgives me that, day by day. And He keeps reminding me that loss is merely a passing reality, a fleeting affliction. What exists in heaven, in my Lord’s arms, is much more real and true and certain than whatever we get to witness here below. Death, for us, is an appearance. An apparent separation. A deeply-felt distance. But only to the senses. Never really to the heart. Never to the mind of faith. Death hurts right now, I understand – but it won’t hurt forever. I promise you. Death is not forever; loss is not forever; it is solely for a short time. Someday all the saints will be raised victorious. So don’t be resigned to death, but ready, with them, with all the saints, for what comes after. The saints above, the saints triumphant, they fought the good fight – and we will press on, fighting it, too, under the heavenly banner of their love and model of meekness. They kept the faith, and so shall we, with their godly example treasured in our trying Christian hearts. With all this we will finish the race, together. For the victor’s crown of gold and glory awaits us each. So thanks and praise be unto the Lamb forever and ever, for salvation is eternally His and He graciously gifts it to us, His saints – that none who belong to Him should ever be lost for long, even to the seeming darkness and depth of the grave. In His holy name. Amen. Rev. Shemwell
Various texts 10/29/23 Homily for the Reformation Sunday In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “They will roast a goose now, but in a hundred years’ time they shall hear a swan singing, and they will have no choice but to hear him out.” Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, these few words I just spoke to you were some of the final words of Jan Hus, a fifteenth century Czech reformer who, having taught the truth of Sola Scriptura and having dared to criticize the blatant abuses of the Roman Catholic church in Bohemia in his day, was condemned to death as a heretic at the Council of Constance in the year 1415 and was thereafter burnt at the stake, a most unchristian fate. Jan’s last name, Hus, means “goose” in the Czech language, so I’ve been told. So they literally roasted a goose in 1415 – and about a hundred years later, give or take a year, a swan indeed began to sing around the university town of Wittenberg, Germany. Jan Hus was right; perhaps God revealed this truth to him at the very end of his earthly life – He must have. But what was repressed in the fifteenth century was far too commanding and formidable to stamp out in the sixteenth. They did not listen to the poor goose, to the bodily detriment of St. Hus; they put him on the roast and burnt him to a crisp. But the saintly swan who came later, they could not think to ignore. This powerful imagery that was elicited from the tongue of a man being led to his own funeral pyre has lasted throughout the centuries, and thanks be to God. In many images and icons of our blessed Martin Luther, you will see a swan at his side. It is, in many ways, his symbol – his spirit animal, if you good Christian people would be willing to humor a loose heathen analogy. Jan Hus was burnt alive and his ashes were tossed carelessly into the Rhine River. But Luther began on fire, he was inflamed by the Holy Spirit from the get-go, so no church authority nor civil ruler was ever going to be able to stop the truth from bellowing right out of his fierce German lips. They could not stifle the great swan’s song. 2 And as St. John relays to us in his apocalyptic vision this morning, “there was once an angel who flew directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on the earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. And the angel said: ‘Fear God and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come, and worship Him Who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.’” This angelic figure seen long ago was none other than our bold reformer, dear Dr. Luther. It was a heavenly vision of a future visionary in an Augustinian monk’s habit and cowl braving the forces of the Holy Roman Empire at the Diet of Augsburg for the sake of the Gospel and God’s people. Or at least that is undoubtedly how church tradition has interpreted those particular biblical words over past the half millennium. And so this feast day we remember and celebrate Luther’s legacy and the legacy and future of the faith he and others suffered to bequeath and graciously hand down to us, seemingly from on high. What happened five hundred years ago was indeed a reformation. It began with the church and then spread to every single facet and aspect of human life. After Christ Himself, perhaps no other man has engendered more change in this fallen world than Martin Luther. And change immeasurably for the better. Ours was a true reformation. A reformation of the church catholic. However, in this day and age, five hundred years on, there is not one single lesson, but rather two primary lessons and takeaways from this reformation that we must not lose sight of nor forget. Firstly, reformation itself is never quite finished. The church is admittedly never perfect. Our doctrine may be perfect and pure, as it has been given to us in our confessional documents—and it is perfect and pure, to be sure—but practice seldom is. So some sense of reform must always remain a viable option, for the sake of correcting poor and impure practice. But the second and equally important—and entirely related—lesson is this: ours was a conservative reformation, as the sainted Missouri Synod theologian Charles Porterfield Krauth once famously argued. 3 In his magisterial 1871 book The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology, Krauth writes: “The spirit of the Reformation was no destroying angel, who sat and scowled with a malignant joy over the desolation which spread around. Instead, it was overshadowed by the wings of that Spirit Who brooded indeed on the waste of waters and the wilderness of chaos, but only that He might unfold the germs of life that lay hidden there, and bring forth light and order from the darkness of the yet formless and void creation. It is vastly more important, then, to know what the Reformation retained than what it overthrew; for the overthrow of error, though often an indispensable prerequisite to the establishment of truth, is not truth itself; for it may clear the foundation simply to substitute one error for another, perhaps a greater for a less.” Good old Krauth, he always had a way with words – and such facility with the English language. He was easily one of the finest theologians this American synod has ever produced. And I highly recommend that book to you all. Anyhow, for us now, we already know well what the Reformation overthrew, don’t we? It overthrew legalism, works-righteousness, the foolish dependence on fallen human reason and uncertain tradition over against the clear, perspicuous Word of God, and the tyranny of the papacy and of faithless popes, of course. Naturally, the dangers of these things have been ingrained in us from our catechesis as Lutherans, either as lifelong members of this church body or as recent converts. And the threat of these dangers always looms in the background, make no mistake – because the devil never takes a day off. We have to bear that in mind continually. But friends, Krauth is right. It is just as important in our time, if not more important now than ever before, to know and to confess what the Reformation retained, what it kept and maintained in addition to what it rejected and overthrew. We must not simply align ourselves with the greater Protestant Reformation and movement. We here celebrate the Lutheran Reformation, not every so-called Protestant breakaway in the sixteenth century and thereafter. 4 In the mind of Luther and most Lutherans five hundred years ago, and most Lutherans for several hundred years, for that matter, in their minds, the theological menace presented by Rome and the papacy in the sixteenth century was soon surpassed and quickly overshadowed by the unspeakable abuses, untruths, heterodoxies, and potential and apparent heresies that were born out of the Radical Reformation. We reject Rome’s claim to primacy. That should go without saying. Yet we just as much repudiate with a full throat those who throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water; who, for instance, disparage and downgrade the Means of God’s Grace, who belittle the Office of the Holy Ministry, and who eagerly dismiss the valuable and salutary traditions of the church catholic. Not the Catholic church but the church catholic – there is a profound distinction between the two, and one that is incredibly consequential for us Christians in every age and generation. We cast aside what was wrong with the church in the fifteen-hundreds – but only what was wrong and unbiblical and unnecessary. We do not now, nor have we ever, abandoned whatever is precious and profitable in what the church in her wisdom practiced for several thousand years. Rather, we welcome and embrace tradition and are proudly called traditional. And the growth we see here right now, at Bethlehem this very morning, and that we will continue to see—mark my words—proves the indispensability and the treasure of church tradition. To be certain, in the Middle Ages, the church in Rome began to depart from what was entrusted to her from the early church and from the apostles themselves. She began to depart from Holy Scripture above all. A reformation was therefore fitting and altogether necessary. Having said that though, Luther did not set about to create a new church. To the day that he died, Martin Luther considered himself catholic. That’s a fact, you can look it up. He was well aware of what the word really and truly meant, what it always meant. Instead of creating a new denomination, Luther set about to clean and clear the figurative threshing floor of the church of his own birth, to restore it to that pristine state which the church herself had once inherited and enjoyed for centuries. 5 Luther recognized that the church desperately needed change, and with the Holy Spirit on his side, he risked his life time and again for the sake of the Gospel, for the sake of evangelical change. But that change he sought, it was not a change into something new at all – hardly. Rather it was in truth a return to the plain truth, a return to what the church previously was, from her infancy, a return home, so to speak, a homecoming, a return to herself as the church of all time; thus it was not a new formation but a re-formation. And again, ours was a conservative reformation or re-formation. We conserved what was always worthwhile in the church we inherited. That’s what it means to be conservative, by the way – to actually conserve the good of the past, not merely to stave off the backwards and satanic supposed progress of the future. And that is still our duty today, to conserve the truth, that truth which has stood and will continue to stand the test of time and which is, in fact, eternal. Luther was able to witness that truth because he stood on the shoulders of giants, the giants of the church past, like we do presently. But the radical reformers in his century, whose descendants are still with us today, they were never able to catch a real clear glimpse of the truth Luther saw because they voluntarily hopped down from those giant shoulders and ended up tripping on their own individual pride on the way down and landed face first in the mud of enthusiasm and sectarianism. The danger of Roman theology and practice is always out there. Works- righteousness is forever in the air. Our inclination toward it is in our very nature as sinners. But I submit to you that in our current theological landscape, it is not really Roman Catholic thought and practice that is our most pressing concern. Lutherans in America have always suffered from a bit of Romaphobia. And understandably so. When we first came here, we did not wish to be lumped in with those loyal to the Vatican by other Protestants. There was then a healthy reason for this fear and suspicion of Roman association, as it were – and considering the most recent quite counter-scriptural utterances of Pope Francis regarding sexuality and church blessings, that fearful suspicion is still warranted to a degree. 6 However, the pendulum has arguably swung too far now in the other direction. Sometimes we are overly willing to jettison, to forsake and disown useful and meaningful practices from our own Lutheran past, from our rightful heritage as the true church on earth founded by Jesus Christ in the first century, for the simple sake of distancing ourselves in appearances from Rome. But in so doing, our actions are not neutral. Actions are never neutral – every action, every bodily movement in our brief lives, articulates a deeper meaning and teaching, whether deliberately or inadvertently and unknowingly. So, by blindly, even unthinkingly acting to distance ourselves further and further from the Roman church as a reactionary, reflexive, and impulsive tendency, by doing this we invariably run the risk of bringing ourselves ever closer to those greater threats that Luther once acknowledged and which Krauth once advised explicitly against. By betraying the conservative nature of our reformation, we may end up siding with those who are further from us in doctrine and practice than Rome itself. And we have to admit that, bless her heart, that is occasionally the case in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, where some worship services constructed around the notion of Sunday morning entertainment, along with all the questionable theology those services subtly imply, they suffer the lack of even a trace of Lutheran distinction. And how sad that is – that some would gladly forego their Lutheran heritage and patrimony and identity when doing so no longer even brings young people through the doors, if it ever once did, truth be told. But I don’t even remotely believe that that is the case here at Bethlehem and in East Tennessee. We love tradition, we love the liturgy, we love being Lutheran, and we sure aren’t afraid of showing it. But let us always be on guard against the temptation toward superficial popularity and the world’s approval, because it is present with us constantly. We are not generic Protestants. We are Lutherans. We are a via media in the Latin, a middle way of sorts, somewhere in between the Catholic and Protestant world out there. We are evangelical, we are the evangelicals – we literally coined the term! – yet we are also still catholic in the most genuine sense of the word. That is our heritage, and we ought to fight like crazy to hold onto it. Luther certainly did. 7 And we honor him and the Reformation he ignited by continuing to fight like crazy to preserve what the Lutheran faith meant in 1517 and 1521 and 1530 and what it should mean now in 2023 and beyond. We are justified by grace through faith alone. This grace is given as a free gift from God, worked by the power of the Holy Spirit and received through a faith in Christ which is just as much a free gift from God. We are not justified by the law. No part of the law ever saves us. Only Christ’s sacrifice saves – only His perfect obedience to the law on our behalf at Calvary redeems. Scripture alone. Grace alone. Faith alone. These are what deliver us. The Word of God is the sole source of our doctrine. It is our authority. Not popes, not councils, not even tradition, but God’s inspired Word. These things Rome let slip and forgot in former and foregone centuries, and we had to remind her. Regrettably, she didn’t then listen and instead doubled down on her errors and evidently does so to this very day. But for us, there is more. We further believe that God works His grace through means, through physical things, through sacraments. He saves us through Holy Baptism, through a watery rebirth, even as infants. He forgives us through the absolution spoken out loud by an ordained minister on Sunday morning, which means that we obviously do not reject the dominical, divine institution of the Office of the Holy Ministry. And God feeds us through His own Son’s body and blood. Our Lord is physically and fleshly present with us in the Supper, without question. That is our faith. And moreover, we cling to the liturgy, we cling to the traditions the church has held for millennia, and we comprehend the significance of beauty in worship. The church architecture, the spires and steeple, the organ, the stained glass, the statuary, the crucifix, the sign of the cross, the ancient creeds, the historic lectionary and the feast days of the church year, the paraments and vestments and colors and clericals, kneeling at the altar and our other sanctifying gestures, our unparalleled hymnody, and the theological literature of the Western Christian canon. These are ours. 8 We are not iconoclasts; we are not enthusiasts. It is okay for the house of God and our worship to be beautiful and even sublime, every Sunday; it should be, and consciously so. We should aim for our worship here to be the most beautiful and most edifying Christian worship in this town, in this state, in all of Appalachia – why not? It is scriptural, after all. Puritanism and Pietism are not – and so they have no place here whatsoever. We do not despise the flesh nor creation, but recognize that creation is the vehicle for our salvation. Luther understood that so well. And we Lutherans still proclaim this truth today so very well. That is why our worship is defined by beauty – which, if you haven’t already noticed, is something painfully absent and purposely neglected and distorted in the world out there these days. So what a reprieve and delight it is to at least be able to see it once a week in this sacred place. And the beauty of our services will, by the way, with the help of God, continue to draw new believers to us, I promise you that. You know, I feel like I have a special perspective on all this, as a convert – and a convert from Rome, no less. I know well the theological troubles associated with the teachings of that fold, trust me. The Holy Spirit led me out of that church, by the grace of God, and truth be told, through Martin Luther’s own words – he and I were both led out of that same church and into the church catholic and reformed right here. But having this unique perspective, as a convert, I fully understand how crucial it is that we hold fast to what actually makes us Lutheran. Again, we are not like every other church out there. This day is not a celebration of the Protestant Reformation. It is a celebration of our Lutheran Reformation. It is a celebration of our church, which is like no other church on God’s green earth. So let us be sober-minded then, like Luther himself was. Let us be ready to reform our practice where needed, yet let us also be equally concerned with conserving and cherishing whatever in the tradition is of value. We are not radical, we are evangelical. We are clearly not Roman Catholic, but neither are we strictly speaking Protestant; we are instead Lutheran, that sweet scriptural spot right in between. Never forget that, dear faithful. 9 Jan Hus perhaps heard the faint crooning of the swan song as he was led gravely to his own fiery pyre. A century later, that song burst forth, a mighty chorus none could even feign to disregard. That is our song, friends, the song of the Gospel, the song of the truth of Holy Scripture, the song of that middle way, the song of Luther’s reformation breakthrough and the song of the Book of Concord published over half a century later. That’s the music of our God-given faith. We ought to never conform to the songs of this world, neither to the songs of those with whom we are not in agreement and unity, however seemingly popular and seductive those songs may be. Rather, let us sing our song steadfastly, together, and loudly, until Jesus Christ Himself comes back to sing it with us. Let us belt it out to the heavens. We are Lutherans. Therefore, let us be Lutheran. Let everything that title means be our perpetual anthem today and tomorrow and the day after. We are Christians, yes, of course – and we are Lutherans, too. To be Lutheran is to be Christian and to be Christian is to be Lutheran – for being Lutheran means nothing more and nothing less than being biblical and confessional and traditional and faithful to Christ Himself. And thanks and praise be to God for that blessed fact. So take pride in your faith, brothers and sisters. And be unapologetically Lutheran this day and every day. In the most holy name of Jesus. Amen. Rev. Shemwell
Matt. 22:15-22 10/22/23 Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Oh boy. We don’t always like to hear that, now do we? You know, the fourth commandment also applies to our civil rulers, as much as that grieves us to admit on occasion. And even when our overlords are no good—which is quite often, most of the time, let’s be honest—our civil and, yes, our annual financial obedience to them is nevertheless due. Hard to hear, yet regardless true. But let’s back up just a moment, friends, and answer the obvious question: what exactly is going on in our gospel text today? What precisely is the core message from our Lord that we should take away? I mean, is He merely telling us that we should be good responsible taxpayers? Certainly there’s much more to it than all that. So let’s find out by starting from the top. St. Matthew informs us in our reading that the Pharisees along with their disciples and some Herodians once set about to entangle Jesus with His own words. This is surprising and interesting, because one would be led to think and expect that the Pharisees would want to have nothing at all to do with the Herodians to begin with. You see, the two factions were something like sworn enemies. The Pharisees, being hyper- observant Jews, were all about restoring the Davidic kingdom in a geopolitical sense, right? That’s why they anticipated a political Messiah. Whereas the Herodians, on the other hand, who were ethnic Jews though not necessarily super faithful in their religious observance, they were at the end of the day what we would call loyalists to Herod and his legacy and to the prevailing status quo of the Roman Empire’s control over Judea. The Herodians did not really want to restore the Davidic kingdom because they were pretty much satisfied with the way things were. They were turncoats in the eyes of many Jews, the Pharisees very much included here. 2 But in their impious and villainous desire to entrap Jesus with His own words, the Pharisees and their disciples teamed up with those they considered impure and treacherous, the collaborating Herodians, all for the sake of undermining this so-called Messiah they had no interest in ever acknowledging. So these two opposing religious and political groups got together and they went to test the Lord. The conversation, as St. Matthew relays it to us, begins with an awfully ingratiating and honey-tongued tone: “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and that you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances.” But immediately following all that duplicitous smooth-talking on the part of the cunning Pharisees and Herodians, the trick question comes quickly – a trick question which, in their minds, would entangle Jesus by forcing Him either to profane a religious ordinance by agreeing to pay a tax to an emperor who considered himself godly and divine, as evidenced by the narcissism of his own facial inscription on the Roman currency, which was of course a form of blatant blasphemy in the eyes of the strict and devout Pharisees, or it would force Jesus to refuse the Roman tax ordinance altogether, which would have been unthinkable and a form of civil disobedience to the servile and indeed sycophantic Herodians. It was a lose-lose scenario in the mind of our Lord’s antagonists. Jesus’s answer was either going to demonstrate loyalty to the religious law or at least to the predominant religious sentiment against the ruling authority or, alternatively, He would have to show fealty to the empire itself, an empire which frequently oppressed the religiously-observant Jewish population by powerful military presence and force. What a perfect trick question, so they thought. Someone wasn’t going to like the answer, someone wasn’t going to be happy, no matter what Jesus said. But let’s pause here just a moment for a little reflection. It is incredibly easy for us to condemn both the Pharisees and the Herodians in our narrative. Our Lord’s enemies had been trying to ensnare him for quite some time. And at last, they thought they had a full proof plan to put an end to this would-be-Messiah. 3 Now that is despicable from our pious perspective, right? – from our advantageous vantage point this side of the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of that very true Messiah. Yet let us stop for a second and contemplate the matter of intention. What was really behind and beneath their spiteful and malevolent plan? Think about it. What likely motivated our Lord’s adversaries here? Well, as far as I can tell, in a matter of words – it was an inclination toward deceit; toward dishonesty and trickery; it was a matter of self- serving motives; a proclivity toward pride and self-interest and an enthusiastic willingness to destroy a good man’s reputation; and above all else, it was a readiness to test and tempt God Himself. Which are far from wholesome intentions, clearly. But let me ask you, dear faithful, are those qualities and characteristics specific to those two opposing religious and political sects two thousand years ago? Or are they not equally pervasive to this very day, ubiquitous, ever-present all over the world, and in truth, in the very heart of every last man and woman? Have you ever lied? To others? To yourself? To your God even? Have you ever used manipulation to get what you want at work or at home, or heaven forbid, here amid the congregation of the faithful? Even slight deceit – have you ever once relied on it – and maybe even justified it to yourself after the fact, as if it were okay? Or have you recently spoken uncharitable and even untrue things about your neighbor behind their back? Maybe what you spoke was socially acceptable – gossip generally is these days, sad to say. But did what you said help your neighbor, or did it harm their good name? Have you at times cared nothing at all about the reputation of others? And have you perhaps stooped to testing even your own God in recent memory? Have you given Him ultimatums in your dark and desperate moments? Have you assumed that He is the one Who serves you rather than the other way around? Now maybe you don’t do these things on purpose, in a calculated and premeditated way like our Lord’s foes – but search your heart – really search it. Are you always faithful? Or is your relationship with God sometimes terribly transactional and conditional, corrupt and outright crooked? 4 And does that lack of fear, love, and trust—which is what it all boils down to—does it manifest itself in how you treat others in your day-to-day existence? If you sometimes use God to get your own way, and curve Him and His many gifts inward, upon yourself, then it stands to reason that you’d just as well use others to do the same. Or, to be honest, that common sense possibility works the other way around as well. If you misuse others, you probably misuse your God now and again. Personally, I know all this is painfully accurate in my life. I have sinned all these sins over the course of time. I am no better than the Pharisees and Herodians at heart. Had I been there in the first century, I may well have hollered with them: “Crucify Him!” to Pontius Pilate’s offer to the vicious crowds. And really now, it doesn’t matter. Speculation here doesn’t matter one bit. Because I did yell that in eternity. I absolutely already did. Every sin I have ever sinned was a cacophonous cry out to the heavens: Crucify Him! Every last fault of mine put my Lord and Redeemer on that cross. Every sin secured His hands and feet with rusted nails, even and especially the socially acceptable ones. I am no better than any other sinner who has ever lived. And in all likelihood, were it possible, I would have been there that day in the midst of our Lord’s enemies waiting for Jesus to get tripped up by this well-thought-out trick question, for the sake of curiosity or even worse, for the sake of a petty laugh. That, or, at best, I would have been but a clueless disciple, standing around with a dumbfounded look on my face, faithless in a lack of certainty in my Lord as He faced a seemingly impossible inquiry. We are all guilty, dear friends. We all crucified our God, if nothing else than by our lack of faith. And we are all unworthy of what that crucifixion earned for us in eternity. But let us return to the text. “Jesus, aware of the malice of the Pharisees and Herodians, said, ‘Why put Me to the test, you hypocrites? Show Me the coin for the tax.’ And they brought Him a denarius, a coin. And Jesus said to them, ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ They said, ‘Caesar’s.’ Then He said to them, ‘Therefore render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.’” And there it is, guys – right there. 5 The perfect answer to that supposedly impossible, unanswerable trick question. Jesus responded to their malicious inquisition by pointing to a truth that we Lutherans like to call the doctrine of the two kingdoms. There is the left-hand kingdom, the kingdom of power, that of the world, of earthly rulers, of civil law. And there is the right-hand kingdom, the kingdom of God, of heavenly law. They are distinct. The one is temporary and fleeting, the other is eternal and unchanging. The one requires gifts of money to be given to perpetuate its earthly authority, whether for good or ill. And the other is ruled only by the Almighty, All-benevolent, All-gracious Giver of Gifts – by the liberal hand of the one true God Who reigns from the heavens above, Who is always merciful, and Whose good and perfect gifts are both temporal and eternal, for both body and soul, and for all. Yes, Caesar’s face was on the denarius, the coin. The tax was owed to him. But God’s own image is imprinted, impressed, and inscribed upon the souls of all men, that immortal coin within. The gift of creation and redemption is given to all freely – and all that is due in return is fear, love, and trust in the one Who alone creates and redeems. Jesus understood all this. And He knew likewise that in a short span of time, His own blood would be the required tax to cover the iniquities of a fallen and undeserving creation. In order for that divine image to be restored in the souls of believers, Jesus would have to be betrayed, arrested, interrogated, beaten, mocked, stripped, nailed, suffocated, and bled out on an ugly cross. But being God Himself and wholly sinless, there was not an ounce of malice in His benevolent heart in that moment of interaction with the Pharisees and Herodians and before their black-hearted trickery. Knowing all things, He answered a question from wicked and malicious men with a plain truth: render unto the world what belongs to the world, but more importantly, render unto God what belongs to Him. And make no mistake, dear flock, through the blood of Jesus, all saved by His sacrifice belong to God the Father. They are His possession. We are His possession. Therefore, all buried and resurrected by way of a baptism into the Triune name owe themselves to God and to God alone. 6 In space and time, in history and the here and now, pay the tax, by all means, obey. But with a mind toward eternity, worship God and none other. Serve Him and serve Him single-mindedly and unwaveringly. But the text continues: “When the Pharisees and Herodians heard what Jesus said, they marveled. And they left Him and went away.” They marveled, yes, but their marveling was all too brief. They would again soon scheme to get Jesus crucified straightaway. And since all this was ordained by God the Father long before, their schemes were ultimately successful, on the surface anyhow. Jesus, the Son of God, was handed over and eventually executed. While that fact was a tragedy for our Lord’s poor flesh on the cross, it is fortunate and favorable for those of us who so desperately need the forgiveness of sins that His sole sacrifice was able to afford so many centuries ago. So what’s the message for us today in 2023? Of course, pay your taxes. Of course, obey your rulers, insofar as they do not transgress the clear law of God. And as Luther tells us in the Small and Large Catechisms on the fourth commandment, don’t just obey your sovereigns, but honor them, love and cherish them even. That’s not always easy. I understand, trust me. I have always had a bit of a rebellious spirit myself – and to be frank, it is has gone nowhere with the passage of thirty-three or so years. And there’s always solid justification for rebellion and defiance, isn’t there? We can usually come up with something or another. Our rulers fail us time and time again. But just remember that when you do serve them, honor, love, and cherish them—which you are called to do, however much of an annoyance or inconvenience it may be—you are really serving, honoring, loving, and cherishing God in heaven. When you render unto Caesar what is his, you are doing so foremost in obedience to God, Who, as St. Paul tells us in his epistle to the Romans, establishes all authority on earth, even when that authority seems precarious and downright unchristian. Yet here’s what is more significant for us to remember this morning. Obey your earthly authorities for this your time on earth, but worry much more about obeying God Who controls all timeless fate. That’s really the takeaway from our present lesson. 7 As the Lord declares earlier on in St. Matthew’s gospel: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear Him Who is able to destroy both body and soul in Gehenna, in hell.” Our frustrations with our worldly rulers often cause us to concentrate on the “render unto Caesar” part of this Sunday’s text. But actually, that is entirely secondary, beloved. That is not nearly as consequential at the end of the day. Render unto God what is His. That’s what really matters. And you yourself belong to Him. You don’t own yourself anymore. In fact, you never actually did. You once belonged to the prince of darkness, to the ruler of this world, by your birth. But now you belong to God, the heavenly King, by your rebirth. So render yourself unto Him as a living sacrifice, as St. Paul encourages us. Fear, love, and trust in Him above all things. Study His Word constantly, come to church regularly and joyfully, and eagerly receive the body and blood of your Lord with a repentant and worthy heart. Come here prepared, in a deliberate and conscious manner, having weighed your own sins and their horrible consequences for the beaten and bloodied body of God, and anticipate good godly gifts nonetheless. Whenever you act like a Pharisee or a Herodian – which I know you do, because like me, who does that all the time, you are still a miserable sinner – whenever you fall short of the glory of God and sin against Him and against your neighbor, seek His forgiveness immediately. Do not procrastinate. Seek that forgiveness purchased not with gold or silver coins but with Christ’s holy, precious blood at Calvary, spilled out and then spoken and delivered without cost within the security of these brick walls of Bethlehem. Let that absolution wash you clean. Obey God above all by letting Him forgive, heal, feed, strengthen and sanctify you through Word and Sacrament. Caesar’s face was on the denarius, true enough. And that hasn’t changed over the last two millennia or so. The rich men north of Richmond, as they’re latterly called, the emperors of the current day in the swampy suburbs of D.C. and on Wall Street, they still rule the world and they still foolishly think they are gods just like that senseless Caesar once did. 8 But the true God’s image, the image of the only God, is imprinted, impressed, and inscribed on your very soul. So render yourself unto Him more than any other. Give Him your all, that He may make you into so much more than you could ever dream of making yourself. Every moment of this life is simply another chance to face eternity faithfully. To look death and the life to come straight in the eye, like a man, in good faith and with sure knowledge of your place in it. This life here with our obedience out there in the world lasts for a little while – and it passes with great haste, as you well know. So we should live it dutifully and meekly, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty, as St. Paul says. However, our obedience to the Heavenly Father lasts forever. There are eternal gains and eternal losses involved. Therefore, again, examine your priorities daily. Take that advice home with you this morning. And render your body, your heart, mind, and soul, your time, energy, and your resources accordingly. That is God’s good and gracious will for you and for His holy and everlasting kingdom. In the blessed name of Jesus. Amen. Rev. Shemwell
Phil. 4:4-13 10/15/23 Homily for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost Our sermon text is again the lectionary reading from St. Paul’s epistle to the church in Philippi. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” And St Paul later proclaims: “I can do all things through Him Who strengthens me.” Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle—maybe you’ve heard of him before—he once defined human beings as being foremost rational animals. That was his definition. His idea was that our rationality, our capacity for reasoning and understanding, is, more than anything else, that which sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. A crab or a crow, they don’t seem to reason quite like we humans reason, or so the thinking goes. And many throughout the ages have bought into Aristotle’s logic here. We humans reason in a way that other animals don’t – therefore, that is primarily what distinguishes us. Now, the fact that we men and women are not actually animals at all but are rather set over and above the animals, having been created in the very image of God Himself, that fact set aside for just a moment, even the rest of what that famous pagan philosopher suggests is terribly nearsighted and downright wrong. It is not our reason so much that really sets us apart from the rest of the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, though it might seem like that at first glance. Instead, it is our language. It is our capacity for language. It is words; speech; the ability to communicate. That is what defines and determines us as humans – that is what makes us men and women and not cattle and other wild creatures. 2 God gave us, the pinnacle of His handiwork, the crown of His creation, the breath of life and the power of speech – the power to name the rest of the animals, an authority granted in the garden to Adam alone. And language, friends, when you really get down to it, language, that gift and authority, is the very basis of our reason. You cannot reason without language. Try your best to think sometime without words. Do it. Give it a shot. And let me know how that goes for you. No, language is the foundation of all reasoning and rationality, without exception. We are, above all else, linguistic beings – we are speaking creatures – embodied souls having both intellect and tongues. That is how God made us. And He made us different from every other creature out there. God created everything in existence through language, all the universe was created by His divine word. And in making us in His image on the sixth day, He gave us words as well; words to create with, words with which to share in the joy of creation. So in other words, God made us to speak. He made us so that we could speak back to Him, so that we could communicate with Him. So that we could love Him with words, in words, and through words. That’s in part why it was not good for Adam to be alone – he needed a bride with whom to converse. But more than all that, God did not solely create the universe with language and create us, His finest work, for the purpose of language, but He furthermore continues to save us, His fallen creation, through language. Language was the basis for our creation and for all creation, but it is moreover the bedrock of our redemption. How do I know that? Well, because the Word saves – and the Word is a linguistic thing, it is writing and speech and articulation. It is a communication from the Creator to the creature through the creature, as Johann Georg Hamann once put it. It comes from God to us and to one another through bodily form, through physical means. Namely, through one man. Remember friends, the Word became flesh, right? That is what St. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel. Christ is the Word Who became a man. The Word, as we understand it, is the Bible, without doubt. But the Word is also law and Gospel proclaimed from this pulpit. 3 And even more wondrous and mysterious than that, the Word is just as much God made flesh, a human being named Jesus Who was born at Bethlehem, Who taught with words, and Who was crucified outside the walls of the holy city of Jerusalem for the sins of the whole world. God is the incarnate, embodied Word. And God redeems us through that Word. Through language. Through speech. Through words inspired, written down, read, spoken, prayed, and preached. And through flesh as well. Through the Word made flesh. God is not a God Who is far off. He is not just distant in the heavens. He is transcendent, to be sure. But He nevertheless condescends to us, He reaches down to us, He bends down to our childish level, He stoops down to our human lowliness, and He speaks to us through our own native tongue. Just like Jesus once stooped down to scribble a message in dirt that was unfortunately lost to future generations. God is right here, in the Word read aloud, in the Word preached, and in the Word administered in body and blood at this hallowed altar, the body and blood of the Word made flesh and named Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Messiah. And all these things are essentially a matter of language – of a word – of the Word in its glorious and various forms. So here’s what I’m getting at, dear faithful. When you gather here on Sunday morning and you confess your sins together as a congregation, I, as your pastor, then pronounce the words of forgiveness or absolution. It is a part of our service, correct? But here’s the thing. Those words I speak, they are not merely a reminder about your being forgiven. They are not merely a broad declaration of forgiveness – it is not just a matter of me telling you something you didn’t already realize. No, friends, the words I speak out loud for the sake of your ears and your souls are the forgiveness itself. When I utter the words of absolution in Christ’s stead and by His authority, by the authority of the Word incarnate, that utterance from my lips, those very words, that is forgiveness. That’s where it is – where it is located for the sake of your certainty – so that you can hear it and have sure faith in it. That is how you hear about the good news of your forgiveness won on a cross, which is conveyed through words and which is indeed now accomplished through words. The means of grace depend on words. 4 And this is what we call performative speech. I am not just telling you something descriptive in a matter of words—I am not just describing something to you, not even just the nature of your forgiveness—but rather, when I speak the words of forgiveness to you, I am doing something with the words and through the words. Or put more accurately, God is doing something for you through me by the words I speak to you. Does that make sense? For instance, imagine when someone christens a ship. You ever seen a ship christened before? So when this happens, the one christening the ship speaks some words of blessing over the new vessel, they name the ship out loud—they give her a name and speak it—and then they usually break a bottle of champaign over the ship’s bow. That is the historical christening ceremony for a new ship. And after this ceremony is finished, the ship is considered christened. But here’s the question: what part of all that ceremony actually makes the ship christened? What does the work, so to speak? What aspect of the ceremony does the heavy lifting? What precisely in the ceremony christens the ship? It isn’t the champagne bottle shattering over the bow, that’s for sure. But in truth, it is the words themselves that do the work. When the blessing is spoken and when the ship is named out loud by its new owner while the champaign bottle is broken, those spoken words do something. They don’t just mean something, they don’t just relay new information, but they do something. They perform an action. The words themselves christen the ship. The speech does the work. The words make something new that wasn’t there before – namely, a christened boat. That is what we mean when we talk about performative speech. Speech that performs. Some words in human language describe things, yet other words do things. That is how language works sometimes. And brothers and sisters, in this ceremony here, in our Divine Service, the words you hear are what are important. The words do something for you and they do something to you. And that something they do is remarkable – something done seldom elsewhere in this earthly life. 5 The words of forgiveness forgive you. The words of absolution absolve you; they cleanse you of your sin. You are changed afterwards. You are no longer the same sinner. The words of the baptismal rite, for example, they don’t just describe your baptism, but they make you, when you have faith, baptized; the words baptize you. God’s Word spoken by a minister baptizes you. The water, while necessary, does not do the baptizing – neither does the minister, for that matter, even by his authority; but the Word through the power of the Spirit baptizes. The Word does the work. The words of Institution spoken over the elements of bread and wine, they do something too. They don’t simply retell the story of the Last Supper. Anyone who suggests as much is wrong. No, those words consecrate the Supper here and now, such that our Lord is really and truly and physically present. Words have the power to do this. Again, our God created with words, He created all things out of nothing with a word voiced into the void. “Let there be light!” Words are profoundly creative. And God gives His church the authority to speak redemption and the language of new creation through words every single Sunday. Forgiveness, life, and salvation: these promises are spoken and kept and ultimately fulfilled through language, through the Word. Never forget, dear friends, that language is so incredibly crucial. It is everything. Language brings the reality of what happened at Calvary twenty centuries ago to life for you in your heart, and in your body and soul, on this very day. Words bring the merits of that sacrifice offered up over six thousand miles away to benefit for you right here right now. Words are the foundation of the means of grace. God works His will for your salvation by way of words – and by way of the Word. But okay, pastor: what’s your point though? What are you driving at with all this highfalutin talk about language? Well dear flock, it is plain and simple actually. This is why what I have said so far matters for us today. St. Paul, picking up where we left off last week, he encourages us, through this letter to the Philippian church read shortly ago, he encourages us to rejoice, to not be anxious, but to think about whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise. We are not to spend our brief lives under heaven in worry and doubt, Paul says. 6 Instead, we are to be joyful always and we are to concentrate on what brings joy: on the true, the just, and the pure in this life and in the life to come. Yet how exactly do we do that when so much in this world is so dark and disgusting and dangerous? How do we focus on nice things when there is so much conflict and chaos raging around us – especially in the Holy Land as of late? When sin abounds as much as it does, how are we supposed to concentrate on the good and the pure? Is it even possible? Or is that not purely naïve, dear pastor? Well, first of all, bear in mind again that Paul offered this much-needed advice while still imprisoned, facing a great deal of conflict and chaos, danger and darkness himself, arguably much greater than our own. But more than that, this is how we concentrate on the good and the pure per Paul’s pastoral recommendation: recall friends, that we are only able to reason because we have language. We can only think because we have words with which to think. That being the case, whatever words we have in our vocabulary, in our memory bank up here, whatever words we have at our intellectual disposal, that is what we will think with. Whatever we put into our minds over time through words is what our minds will work with. That’s how it works. You can only think with what your mind has been given to think with. Even in your imagination, you can only ever imagine with what has been placed into your mind by the senses and through words. A unicorn is no more than a horse with a horn, after all. The mind is kind of like a computer and it depends on data being fed into it. Therefore, the words that you put into your mind, the speech that you spend your day dwelling on, the language that you indulge yourself in, and the phrases you repeat in your head hour by hour, that is really what you will end up thinking about. You will concentrate on whatever you feed your mind. Your thoughts will be centered around your mind’s diet. And things will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Whatever you put in your mind and in your heart is what will come out of your mind and out of your heart. That is guaranteed. 7 All that to say, dear flock, don’t put garbage in your heart and mind. Stop worrying about and fretting over all that σκύβαλον – all that refuse and distraction that is useless in eternity, which we addressed last week. And instead of all that trash, put good words in your heart and in your soul and in your mind. Put true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, worthy words in your precious head. Meditate on those things. And do you know where those things are? [Walk over to get bible] Right here. This is where they are. These are the words you must put in your heart and mind if you ever want to be free of the chains of anxiety and doubt and despair that tether us to this disordered world. If you ever want to be free to think about the good, the true, and the beautiful – you have to turn right here. These words, contained in the Holy Bible, let these words become your vocabulary, your memory bank. Let them become your new alphabet. Learn to think, speak, read, and write again through these words, through the grammar of God’s language, inspired by the Holy Spirit and recorded by the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles. Let Holy Scripture become the very water in which you swim. Surround yourself with it. Read, mark, and inwardly digest the Word of God. Memorize Scripture as well, as best you can. Allow it to become a part of you. Take it to heart and absorb it like the medicine it is. Come to church week after week and hear it again and again. Tie the Word on your hands, bind it to your foreheads, and write it on your doorposts, remember? And eventually, I assure you, doing so will positively impact how you think, and how you live, and even how you hope. And let the words spoken here, in this gathering, the performative words of the absolution, of the sermon, of the Supper, let them flow through you. Do not put up a guard against them. Do not lose attention or focus. Don’t just come here for the sake of coming here and making an appearance. Instead, let the words of forgiveness and salvation have their way with you. Let them melt your hardened heart. Let God love you through these words. That is how He loves you –through His Word. 8 Through the absolution at the beginning of the service, through the lectionary readings, through this sermon, through the hymns we sing and the language of the liturgy, through our collective prayer, through the words of Institution and those most intense and intimate words of all: “The body of Christ, given for you; the blood of Christ shed for you.” Let God create a new creation Sunday after Sunday through these most pure words of all, through His own saving Word. And let that new creation be you. Permit your God to redeem you. And don’t think that that happens in some overly spiritualized, mysterious, ascetic or ecstatic way apart from what happens here in space and time and history. It doesn’t happen that way, I’m afraid. Not usually. It isn’t usually a big, dramatic thing. On the contrary, God creates and sustains and saves and forgives you simply through language. Through common human language, through something very physical, audible, and seemingly ordinary. Like what you hear within these walls. But really, these aren’t only ordinary words you are hearing. That is what I need you to believe and to trust. I am not just having a nice conversation with you up here. I need you to be convicted of the truth that words have the power to do something powerful. And that is just what they do, week after week, in this sacred space. Don’t underestimate the ability of language to transform and transfigure you. If we are, at the end of the day, what’s up here [point to head] and right here [point to heart], just know that what is here [point to head] and here [point to heart], it all begins – or it all once began – with language. When you were a baby – a toddler – a child – language was given to you, as a free gift from your parents and teachers. However, more than that, it was a free gift from God above, from the Author of all things and the Author of your own life. That gift of language was the alphabet, the building blocks, given for your mind to grow – and for your personality, who you are as a person, to blossom. So language is, in a very real sense, what you are. You are a linguistic creature, God’s child imbued with the gift of speech. Language is what you use to think with and to communicate with. As such, you must always be mindful of the words you use and cling to. Be thoughtful of the words you spend your day hearing and speaking. 9 Let your words and thoughts be good words and good thoughts. Let the words you imbibe be honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, praiseworthy words. Let them be biblical, Christian, and life-giving words. That’s the pastoral advice for the sermon this Sunday. Pay attention to words. Because words matter. Words save. And words are also how we confess our saving faith to the world out there. “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” This is what else St. Paul promises us today. His message is straightforward. What you learn and receive and hear and see in written words; in speech; and in the Word made flesh, Christ Jesus, becoming visible in Holy Communion, hidden yet still revealed under the form of bread and wine; practice these things, Paul urges. Concentrate on these things. If you do, then the God of peace will most assuredly be with you always and everywhere. And the God of peace will strengthen you, such that you, too, can do all things. We, as baptized children of God, can do all things through Him Who strengthens us. We can endure all things, suffer all things, overcome all things, accomplish all things. Paul is right on the money, once again. But if we want that strength from God, if we sincerely desire it from the bottom of our hearts, then we have to recall from whence it comes. We have to remember where to find it. It comes through words. It comes through the Word. The Holy Bible and the Sacraments, that is where it is now found. So cling to these blessed and holy things. Grasp your Lord by grasping those gracious means through which He comes to you presently – through the Word. In His name. Amen. Rev. Shemwell
Phil. 3:4–14 10/08/23 Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost Our sermon text this morning is the lectionary reading from St. Paul’s epistle to the church in Philippi. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or that am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, St. Paul very likely wrote these profound words to the Philippian church during that particular Roman imprisonment we hear a little about at the very end of the Acts of the Apostles. In Roman chains that very first time, St. Paul then realized his hope for release from prison, or house arrest, or whatever confinement it was, that his hope for freedom could take only two possible forms: either fortunate release from the physical bonds of the Roman guard, or a less fortunate release from the physical body entirely through persecution, death, and martyrdom. Those were his only ways out, as it were. But we know, of course, that Paul was eventually freed from that initial incarceration in Rome, right? 2 However, only a few short years later, as the holy tradition of the church tells us, St. Paul was ultimately martyred in that same ancient city, beheaded in the Ardeatino, its twentieth quarter, on the orders of Emperor Nero. Now we might happen to think that a sad story. He was emancipated but then brought right back to the same place to face and suffer his unjust death. And in a sense, it is a sad story. But you know what: Paul certainly wouldn’t have thought so. He wouldn’t have understood it that way. In fact, he didn’t understand it that way. You see, the hope Paul he had when he wrote this letter while jailed to the still somewhat fledgling church at Philippi, this hope was only later perfected by his blessed Roman death. His words here were not undermined by his execution a few years later but they were rather solidified by it. Martyrdom gave his optimistic message an eminently powerful and an enduring meaning down through the ages – a meaning for all the Christian martyrs throughout the history of the church – to this very day. So let us now try our best to learn something for our own present good as the twenty-first century church from these noble words of the holy apostle this morning. And let’s start here – with a single solitary word: σκύβαλον. Yeah. Funny sounding word, huh? Have you ever heard it before? Σκύβαλον. Well, it is an ancient Greek word—because of course it is, I always love to bring the Greek in whenever I can, against all seminary advice to the contrary—but it is an ancient Greek word that we find in our text today. Most translations are pretty mild with handling it though. I think the New King James Version, my personal preference, and the English Standard Version we read earlier render it as “rubbish.” And that’s close, I suppose. But the full meaning, I think, is a tad bit more jarring and, truth be told, a little more graphic than that. Really it means in a visceral, or a very earthy and a kind of coarse way, it means gross waste – it signifies the trashiest of trash – it indicates icky and unpleasant garbage and refuse, and if you really want to get the point across – it denotes dung – yeah, in a rather indelicate sense, it means feces – human waste even. That’s really what we are talking about. And what exactly does St. Paul consider dung and human waste here? Well, everything. Everything other than Jesus, everything in the world, Paul regards as trash and dung, pure rubbish. It is all worthless compared to Christ. 3 Paul never minces words, does he? When it comes to the things of God and the things of men that get in the way of the things of God, there is really no time for politeness. And Paul is right. Nothing matters without faith in Christ. Period. Nothing else matters without Him. Nothing else saves. Nothing else has eternal worth removed from the incarnate God, Jesus of Nazareth, and saving faith in His historical atoning sacrifice. And here’s the painful reality for many that is plainly implied by Paul’s words here: even our own lives, without Christ, they are meaningless and lacking in purpose, worth, aim or any lasting value. That is why we see in this letter Paul’s over-eager willingness to face martyrdom and death. Because if living for him meant forsaking Christ in this life before the despotic Roman authorities, or whomever, then it wasn’t worth it at all – because life without Christ just isn’t ever worth it. Martyrdom itself is more of a gain than such a meaningless and empty trifle of a life. That’s how Paul understood it anyhow. Faith must come before everything, even our own comfort, even our own wants, even our own safety and our own lives. And Paul proved that with his own bloodshed nearly two thousand years ago. He literally lost his head for that eternal truth. And here’s the lesson for us today: we are exceedingly lucky and blessed that Emperor Nero isn’t ruling in 2023, however much we might jokingly suggest otherwise at times. Our government isn’t Nero. We aren’t yet facing real physical persecution in this nation, at least not violent persecution – and thanks be to God. But I seriously worry about the church if we ever were in that dire position. If ever we were under the harsh and repressive rule of a truly anti-Christian emperor or empire. Because look around. We are free to worship our God right now, we are not forcibly restricted from doing so – and yet again, look around: the churches are growing vacant nonetheless. The pews are emptying quickly—and not just the pews themselves like here this morning, but the people in them—they are emptying hastily in every single denomination without fail, and without the slightest threat of force. And even among us faithful few, how many other distractions and concerns we let get in the way of our faith day after day. 4 Money, or mammon, as our Lord calls it – it is meaningless. Vanity of vanities. Material wealth and nice things, the accumulation of hollow, futile, purposeless things, lording money and influence around for the brief enjoyment of some societal clout, it is all meaningless. It is dung and nothing at all in comparison to Christ’s glory. None of it matters whatsoever in the end. King Solomon, again, he made this clear to us in the Book of Ecclesiastes, did he not? Vanity of vanities, remember? So yes, having the newest i-Phone, for instance, not only does that not matter, but it can, if we let ourselves obsess over it, it can become a considerable hindrance and an even a diversion from what actually does matter. The fancy car, the expensive house, the enviable plot of land, the well-manicured yard, the upper-middle-class existence, respectable GDP growth and suburban comfort – none of this will make you genuinely happy and joyful – don’t be deceived, it won’t. Sports and popularity, or your preferred politician winning a debate or an election, or any politics whatsoever, none of that will bring you fulfillment for very long. Attention from others, online influence, the lusts of the flesh and their gratification, the respect and esteem of seemingly important people, these things fade so very quickly. Sic transit gloria mundi – such glory always fades, it is said. Like everyone else, like you and like me, we will each grow old and pass away someday. Brothers and sisters, we are all going to die. Unless Jesus comes quickly, that is our future. And we cannot take any of the stuff we’ve amassed with us. Because in eternity, none of it matters. We don’t need it. It counts for nothing – it is but rubbish. And so if you believe me, which is to say, if you believe Paul, then examine your priorities daily, dear flock. This faith in Christ, this church here and the fellowship you have here and at home with your own faithful family, that’s all that really matters. Everything else is superficial, temporary, and altogether fleeting. Everything else is σκύβαλον. It is just decoration. And it is all useless in comparison to life in Christ and among our Christian brothers and sisters. 5 Having considering that, I want you to do something for me today. Or at least I want you to try to do something – and it is something I have been trying so very hard to be better about myself: when you get home, today or tomorrow, or whenever you get the first chance, as soon as you have the opportunity, take a full day and keep an account of how you spend it. Log the hours. Keep track of what you are doing and what you are thinking, even. Write it down if you need to. We sleep, on average, a third of our lives. We work at least another quarter of our lives. But that leaves about forty to forty-five percent of our lives free. So what do you with all that time? How much of that time is spent valuably, with your family, friends, and loved ones? How much of that time is spent in the Word of God, the very thing that delivers you from death and saves you from sorrow? How many of those seventy or so hours a week are spent in prayer and worship and doing works of mercy, too, lest we forget? And alternatively, how much of your week is spent with things that serve absolutely no purpose in eternity? I urge you to find out for yourselves. And find that out regularly, if need be. Now obviously I’m not saying that there isn’t plenty of time for leisure and entertainment and much-needed rest. Naturally there is. We keep the Sabbath here, we understand the value of rest – we know this better than anyone else – much better than the secular world out there, that’s for sure. There is a time for everything, as that wise king Solomon once also noted. But if God matters most of all, if everything apart from Christ is secondary, then it stands to reason that that truth, that reality, would reveal itself in our daily and weekly lives, in how we spend our time – in how we spend our money as well. Because here’s the thing: someday, we may face actual persecution. We may be confronted with the tyranny of unbelief. It may well be in the cards for some of us. Who knows? And if that day eventually comes, the question is: will we be more willing to part with our creature comforts or with Christ? What will we be more attached to: God or goods? The faith or our own sinful wants and fallen fancies? That’s a question we ought to always bear in mind. Now believe it or not, there are valid reasons to miss church. You heard it from the pastor himself, so there it is. But guys, the thing is: there aren’t very many. There are good justifications for neglecting our daily Bible reading. But those are few and far between. 6 There are even decent causes for forgetting to pray now and again. But they are so incredibly rare. And yet, what do we sinners—myself very much included—what do we do all the time? Exactly those sinful things. You know what we really lost in the garden, friends? In the fall from grace long ago, when Eve took that forbidden fruit and shared it with her disobedient husband? We lost our innocence, we lost the tree of life, we lost our original righteousness and our freedom. But more than that, we also lost all sense of priority. In Eden, faith and family were everything. Worship was everything. And these things used to mean an awful lot in this country, too. Maybe you can remember. Once upon a time, that was the case – God meant something, He meant a whole lot, as did His holy church. But how distractable we’ve become. How part-time and lackluster in our faith, in our doctrine and practice, we as a nation have allowed ourselves to become. But don’t let that be you. Don’t let that be us. Listen to St. Paul. Recall what Christ is really worth – for you and for yours. It is high time for a revival, if you ask me. A revival of the heart and soul, of good theology and good practice, of American Christians being devout and devoted American Christians once again. And here's what we have to revive foremost in our memory: the fact that God made His home in a poor virgin’s womb. The fact that He took on the lowly flesh, with all its struggle and baggage. The fact that He knowingly suffered rejection by His own beloved people. You know, they once welcomed Him into the holy city with celebration and then they straightaway cried out like banshees for His brutal and bloody crucifixion. Pretty much immediately. The cornerstone was once the rejected stone – and He was rejected in such a blatant and vile way – by all men and women, with us being no exception. And then what: He was crowned with thorns, nailed to a cross, and left to die. He underwent all that disappointment, bitter betrayal, and agony precisely because His priority was our redemption. His priority was our deliverance, never once deserved. The salvation of all mankind was His top priority. And He delivered on that priority, defeating the final enemy, death itself, for all those of faith. He was raised on the third day and ascended into heaven, leaving us with His Holy Spirit as our comforter. 7 And that Holy Spirit long ago gave us faith, always a free gift, through our Holy Baptism. And our Lord returns week after week to strengthen that faith in Holy Communion. And God, He is always with us, everywhere we go, as He once promised to Joshua and so many others. He is with us everywhere, speaking to us through His Word, and through the created world out there and through our own individual conscience. The only way you can go a whole day, a whole hour even, without deliberately thinking about God is by putting blinders on – by willfully ignoring His voice and His ever-present nearness and His loving desire for conversation with you. So don’t do that. But be revived instead. God is here with you and for you. Believe these words and these promises. And act accordingly. Let there be a revival of proper priority among us. Worship God here. Worship Him consciously and with reverence and the deepest respect, regardless of what people say. This weekly gathering isn’t just a cute thing we do. It isn’t about keeping up appearances and being hospitable. It is about the one true God coming to you, entering into your broken body and soul, and fixing you, healing you, sanctifying you, and making you perfect, a slow process, to be sure – but a sure process nevertheless. And what an amazing and gracious gift that is. If we honestly believe it, and I sure hope we do, then how could we ever fail to prioritize this gift of forgiveness, life, and salvation? It should come first in everything we do and in everything we are. Christ is the most significant and consequential thing in your life. I know that to be the truth. So do not lose sight of that important truth. Say it to yourself out loud every morning. All things are but loss apart from our Lord. Paul got it so right. He got it right unto death by Roman hands, just like his own Lord. And may we get it right too. No matter what. May we treat Christ, especially His body and His blood, as being of the greatest eternal worth. Of course, maybe you’ve messed up though. Maybe you’ve forsaken your Lord in thought, word, or deed recently. Perhaps you’ve failed to make Him first in your life as of late. Or maybe you’ve even partaken of His own body and His blood in an unthinking and potentially unworthy way. That would not be a surprise, seeing as how we all have at some point. 8 But that’s okay. You’ve repented of it, you have already confessed it here to God, and are therefore forgiven. So then, all that’s left to do now is change course. That’s what repentance is really all about: changing course, turning around. As St. Paul says in encouragement, forget those things that lie behind and strain instead for what lies ahead. Press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Repentance and revival, that’s what we’re trying to be about here at Bethlehem. Today is a new day, friends. You are forgiven and freed – freed the prison chains of sin’s eternal consequence. Sunday is the eighth day which is the first day of the new creation – and you are the new creation. It is the first day of the rest of your saintly life. Your God is here now to absolve and to feed you, to revive you, a miserable sinner, with His own precious body and blood. And may that body and blood make you brand new. In the life to come, our Lord Jesus alone is what matters. Focus on that. Meditate on that, because it is equally as true for this life down below. What is more, tell all your friends about it. Tell them about Him. And at every step, press on toward the goal of life everlasting with Jesus and with all His saints. And when you do that, when you put Christ first, take a moment here and there to truly appreciate the feeling of liberation you then experience, the feeling of freedom and emancipation from all the oppressive heaviness of this weighty life, a freedom only our dear Lord can offer. All this stuff, this σκύβαλον all around us, it doesn’t really matter in the end. All the stress of things and of the profane responsibilities we can’t help ourselves but have – clinging so desperately to these worldly things just wears down our already weary souls. However, Christ and His church, His body, our family here and at home – that’s what matters. That’s what is worth clinging to – in good times and in bad. And having these as your constant priority, that’s the most freeing thing in this earthly life. Therefore, with Paul, count all else as loss, beloved. Christ is the sole gain, along with His body, the faithful Christian church. So press on toward Him. In His holy Name. Amen. Rev. Shemwell
Revelation 22 10/01/23 Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “‘Behold, I am coming soon, bringing My reward with Me, to repay each one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.’ And it is also said: Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter into the city by the gates… And the Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ So let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who so desires take the water of life without price.” Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, our Lord, Christ the King, He is coming. The liturgical season of Advent is on the horizon, of course, only three short months out now. And I know that’s a time of year we all eagerly await, right? If for no other reason than the fact that Christmas follows it, arguably our favorite church holiday. But more importantly than all that, for us faithful believers, our Lord’s final advent, His second coming, His ultimate return on the clouds in glory, His descending from the heavens above just as He once ascended to them, this most momentous advent of all remains forever on the figurative horizon, no matter the time of year. And we know that to be true because our Savior tells us as much in our reading this morning. I ended my sermon last week with these words that we hear again today – Jesus, the King, promises: “Surely I am coming soon!” – Put otherwise: “Don’t worry, little flock, My advent, it is coming very shortly.” Now the holy Christian church has waited many centuries for this advent, millennia even. Our ancestors in the faith, all the faithful departed who preceded us for two thousand years, they once waited like we now wait. In years past, theirs was our present wait, it was no different for them then than it is for us now. They waited patiently, though no doubt with keen expectation. They, the millions if not billions of sinner-saints from every generation, longed for Christ Jesus to return and bring them home, just like we do. And it goes without saying that it has so far been quite a long and protracted anticipation, hasn’t it? Again, two whole millennia. That’s something of a wait, wouldn’t you say? 2 Probably the longest wait in all of human history. But no matter how long that wait continues to last, our Lord’s parting words to His church, recorded in St. John’s apocalyptic revelation, these words are no less true. For as St. Peter tells us in his second epistle, with God, one day is a thousand years and a thousand years is like one day. Our Lord is surely coming soon, and that promise is perfectly kept today, just as it was yesterday and as it will be tomorrow. That is why the church’s chief prayer is “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!” – the closing words of Holy Scripture, mind you, with which we are invited to pray ceaselessly. Jesus’ promise to us is only perfected and made more trustworthy with the passage of time, as paradoxical as that may seem – and so our chief prayer begging for His hastened arrival is mostly a helpful reminder to ourselves of that fact, a reminder of the reliability of His return and the reality that it draws nearer with every blink of the eye and with every new spoken prayer. It is closer with each and every subsequent breath. Closer now … and now … and closer now … But in this growing wait though, in this drawn-out longing for our dear Lord, from this day forth until the very last day of all, we have to remain watchful always and as vigilant as ever, like all those saints who fell asleep before us. Let us never once become like those foolish virgins in the biblical parable whose oil ran out during the night-watch for the Bridegroom. Remember that story? I think it comes up in a month or so in the lectionary. And a funny story about that story: when I was England a few years back, in a gorgeous Anglican or Anglo-Catholic church, there was this remarkable statuary depicting the parable of the foolish and wise virgins. And one of the foolish virgins depicted there, in a striking pose, looked like this – [face palm] – with a face palm felt for eternity and memorialized in marble. It was such a funny yet profound sight. You could feel the concrete regret. So no, let us never be like that, like them, like the foolish virgins. But friends, let us instead be like the wise virgins and let us be found properly prepared when Jesus does return. Let us be greeted by the Groom with robes all washed and readied. Let us, the bride of the church, be composed, well-dressed, attired and adorned for a heavenly matrimony, in a state befitting the holy Bridegroom Himself. 3 He is surely coming soon, so we must not delay in this our preparation or lose watch or vigilance for even the slightest second. And that warning right there, that admonition toward readiness and diligence you just heard from my thirty-three-year-old lips, that’s what these closing Sundays of this current liturgical season are really all about. Preparation. So how? How do we make ourselves ready? How do we make sure we are ready? How do we anticipate our Lord with patience yet prudence? Christ could come back at any moment. Or frankly, dear faithful, we could fall asleep and meet Him first at any moment. This earthly life is fleeting. Our existence is very fragile. Youth, it is no guarantee against that regrettable reality. None of us here are invincible, none of us can escape our fate, and none of us can outrun the hour of our end. So how do we prepare ourselves either for His triumphant return or for our own jubilant journey home? For the end to our wait or for the end to our lives? Well, consider this: the Lord’s angel once showed St. John in his vision a glimpse of the New Jerusalem, with the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, running through a grove of sheer vitality, through the midst of the tree of life with its many healing leaves – and the angel as well showed him the eternal sunshine of the Almighty God’s undying and undiminished radiance, the radiant brilliance of God’s beautiful, incandescent face. But we are not yet there, obviously. That was but a glimpse for one man seen centuries ago and recorded for us latter-day believers to give us hope. But here and now, in 2023, on this wrecked and sin-ravaged earth, instead of a river of life there is rather a great deal of drought all around, often apparent in the ground beneath our feet, like with the sad Colorado river out west, but just as much is there drought present and altogether apparent in the withered and parched hearts of men and women. Sin and its consequences infect and corrupt all creation. Which is why creation remains so devastated today. Look around: there are trees right now ready for their death, a white witch’s winter soon approaching, both in nature with its seasons of discontentment and its misuse and abuse by greedy and careless men, and more importantly there is persistent winter and disease in the souls of the unbelieving world out there, too, whose superficially ripened fruits all spoil in eternity. And there is plenty of darkness, both physical and spiritual. We know that painfully well. 4 It is dark for lengthy periods of time – we ourselves are soon to endure longer hours of darkness. And that darkness is equally as actual in the wicked ways of the world. Evil goes on for days these days. No, as is evident to all with eyes wide to see, we are not yet home. This devastated world is not our true home, we are but pilgrims here. Yet the Bridegroom is nevertheless coming soon, to carry us over the threshold, to hurry us there, to hasten us home, where all things will be made new, where a fresh creation awaits us. Therefore, we must be found ready, at any time. So how? How do we make ourselves ready? How do retain the oil in our spiritual lanterns and keep our robes pure and white? We all want so much to enter into the holy city of the New Jerusalem by the gates someday and to have a right to that tree of life at its center once again. So how do we do that? What do we have to do? What can we do? Our Lord Himself says that He will bring with Him His reward, His recompense, and that He shall repay each according to what he has done. For us, we will be ready for that reward and that holy recompense if we wash our robes and keep them clean – we are assured of this. But how? How do we do that exactly? That’s the important question. Well, put simply, beloved: you do so by staying put. By being still. By being passive and receptive. You are already where you need to be. You are already in the true church on earth, the Church militant, you are in the house of God, you are where robes are washed weekly and where lanterns are kept continually supplied with a sanctifying oil and are perpetually lit. But outside, in the hopeless dark out there, in the lamp-less night beyond these walls, “outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood,” as Jesus and St. John warn us. Now, some of us here have also fallen into sexual immorality at some point, most of us here are idolaters in some way, shape, or form, we all harbor anger and resentment against our neighbor, murdering him or her in our own hearts, according to Christ in St. Matthew’s gospel chapter five, and truth be told, we are all mangy dogs, just like that Canaanite woman begging for the scraps from the master’s table we heard about some weeks ago. 5 However, these particular sins mentioned outside, these unfortunate failings, though grievous and shameful they are, regardless, they are forgivable; and insofar as you’ve repented and confessed them to God the Father, they are thusly truly absolved. You are forgiven them. Your robes washed clean again. It is that easy. Yet what we cannot ever let ourselves become is lovers of falsehood. That is a completely different story. And that is what staying put and holding fast to the true church and her true teachings prevents and precludes. That is why it is so important to be here, within these walls at Bethlehem, in God’s company and in the fellowship of His saints. Sin is forgiven freely wherever there is repentance and faith, full stop. No sin whatsoever is unforgivable or unpardonable, except the sin against the Holy Spirit. But falsehood, faith and falsehood can never coexist. They have nothing to do with one another. One is of the true God and the other of Lucifer. Falsehood, wherever it perpetuates itself in impenitence is unpardonable – and in truth, it is the sin against the Holy Spirit, it is akin to blasphemy – because it is a rejection of the true faith. Our Lord, when He returns in glory, He will repay us for what we have done. But what we have done, what we do now, whatever good is wrought and worked by our feeble human hands, it is not actually even ours to claim, now is it? We went through this a few weeks back. Instead, it is all the work of the Holy Spirit within us, sanctifying us and others through us, as mere vessels of God’s good and gracious will – this work is nothing more than the fruit of our faith, the evidence of our belief – and it doesn’t even belong to us – it belongs to God alone, Who works faith and belief. Our entrance into the holy city someday, it has little at all to do with what we are capable of accomplishing by ourselves. We are sinners, and on our own, we are nothing at all. We would be eternally helpless were it not for the grace of God. And before that grace, as Luther once scribbled on a deathbed note, we are all beggars. 6 No, our passageway into paradise depends solely on faith, it is predicated, based and contingent on faith alone, on faith in the Son of God worked by the Holy Spirit for the sake of the Father’s grace – again, the water of life is offered without price, as our reading promises. We don’t owe anything, because Christ already paid everything. Our hope for the kingdom rests in belief alone – belief in the truth, belief in Christ, not in falsehood, never in falsehood nor false teaching. Belief and falsehood are diametrically opposed, the one only ever diminishes the other. The robes of our bodies and souls were washed clean long ago in Holy Baptism and they are daily rinsed when we cling to our baptismal faith and when we drown the old Adam in us in those cleansing waters. Our sin is pardoned every single Sunday when we walk through those doors there and make our confession collectively as a church – all our sin, the dirt and the filth are bathed away week by week. Those sins great and small that so burden your poor souls, they become nothing at all in the eyes of God – they are forgotten entirely in eternity – the Father solely sees the Son’s sacrifice. And our lamps, dear friends, our lamps are kept lit, kept oiled, kept readied by the Word proclaimed, spoken from the lectern and preached from the pulpit. The pulpit and lectern put oil in your lantern. Think of it that way. So how do you make yourself ready for the King’s coming? You don’t. You simply stay put and you receive what is graciously given to you with thanksgiving. You remain in the bosom of the church; that’s what you should do. You abide precisely where robes and lanterns are so well cared-for. Right here. You cling to the truth rather than to those falsehoods and false teachings out there in the world that tug on the sickly souls of sinners, urging them to abandon the sure certainty they have here in their salvation. There aren’t just dogs outside, but moreover there are wolves, even wolves in sheep’s clothing. They may try to tempt you away from the church, or they may lie to you, to your face, and tell you that you can do something more, that you can add something, that you can do a little bit extra to ready yourself for the final judgment, or that you can even save yourself in the end. But they only ever lie. The wolves and the self-righteous hypocrites and legalists are one in the same. The serpents and the Pharisees are no different, which is why our Lord once called them a brood of vipers. And they and their falsehoods have no place in the coming kingdom. 7 Falsehood and faith are sworn enemies. So don’t be carried away by the god of this world and by the seduction of untruth and false doctrine. Only untruth is unforgiveable. All else is pardoned by Christ’s bloodshed. Never lose sight of that fact. You, friends, are saved by grace through faith. You know this. Truth and faith, faith in the truth, faith in the truth incarnate at Bethlehem and then hung naked on a tree to die twenty centuries ago, these are what prepare the bride of the church for the coming of the Bridegroom. So stay put in these, keep steady in the Word and Sacraments, hold still in pure doctrine and pure practice. Don’t budge and don’t give in – ever. Don’t compromise with untruth and falsehood. We don’t do that. Our Lord certainly never did. Read your bible, at least a few verses each day. I’m serious: I implore you to do that without fail, make it your habit and don’t let yourself break it. Hold yourself accountable. Or have others hold you accountable. And do the same with your catechism while you’re at it. Always say your prayers with a willing heart – and even when your heart is unwilling, say your prayers anyways. Just move your mouth and go through the motions. A willing heart will come with time. And give thanks to God every morning and night. That is a given. And tell the people in your life that you are grateful to God for them too. They might appreciate hearing it spoken out loud once in a while. Ask for guidance and wisdom in your personal vocations, from God and from others. And when you mess up, which you most certainly will, as a husband, mother, friend, or brother, seek forgiveness. Don’t waste time. You don’t know the hour of the Second Coming, nor the hour of your own impending death. So don’t hesitate. But repent and reconcile. That’s what our religion is all about. And stay right here, where the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered. If you do, then you will be ready for whenever the King finally comes, you’ll be good and ready until kingdom come. You will be prepared for His permanent advent. Trust me in this. And yes, you will be ready as well should He first decide to carry you home individually, in His most able arms, over the threshold of death, into paradise, where you will rest peacefully in the company of all the saints until that Last Day, until you are raised body and soul from the grave to inherit the new earth with all the children of God. 8 The Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, the King of glory and of all creation, the Lord of Hosts, He is coming soon, make no mistake. The truth of that statement has only become truer since this sermon first began twenty or so minutes ago. And should you ever feel afraid, or too weak to withstand the seemingly overlong wait, alone or too discouraged and downtrodden to carry on for another difficult day, then do not despair, dear friends. For behold, Christ the King, He comes to you right now as well. To pick you up for a little while, to wipe your cheek, to stand you firm and set you straight, to strengthen and ready you for tomorrow and for the other five days outside these walls. He comes now, this Sunday, this Lord’s Day, to bear you up for the drought, to sustain you for the long winter ahead, and to lead you with His unfading light through the deep darkness of this often-exasperating life. And so very soon, He indeed will come again in glory at last to make all things new – to put an end to each and every sorrow – to raise the dead from their defeated death – to grant us access to the river and the tree of life in that eternal spring on the horizon – to welcome us into His blessed kingdom, where we will live with Him and all our departed loved ones in the faith in righteousness and under His reign forever and ever. Until then though, do not fret, brothers and sisters, everything is going to be alright. It’s going to be okay. I promise you. Because God is always with you – now – and also very, very soon. How do we prepare for His coming then? How do we withstand the wait and ready ourselves for that final advent of His? Well, we do so by being here and receiving Him when He comes to us right now, in this present and perennial advent – in the Divine Service, today and next week and the week after that too. So dear saints, I really hope to see you then. And so does the King, the Holy Bridegroom Himself. In His Name. Amen. |
Archives
February 2024
Categories |