Maundy Thursday

Exodus 12:1-14/Matthew 26:17-30 - Maundy Thursday - March 28, 2013 

For You

The Passover was to be celebrated as a statute forever.  Even before God commanded Moses what to do, He made it very clear how important its celebration would be for years to come and even forevermore.  “This month shall be for you the beginning of months.”  Their whole calendar would be reoriented around the events that God would soon accomplish.  “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord, throughout your generations, as a statute forever.” 

But, of course, we don’t celebrate it anymore, do we?  The reason is simple.  Christ fulfilled it.  The Passover pointed to what Jesus would do to save sinners from eternal punishment.  The reason God was so adamant about its continual celebration wasn’t because of the ritual itself.  No, it was because God requires faith in Christ.  Consider these words from Psalm 51:

O Lord, open my lips,
And my mouth shall show forth Your praise.

For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it;
You do not delight in burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,
A broken and a contrite heart—these, O God, You will not despise.

Lent Midweek

Luke 23:33-34 - Lent I-V Midweek - February 20, 27; March 6, 13, 20, 2013

Confession & Absolution / Office of the Keys
Forgive them!

And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” 

O sinner, come thy sin to mourn,
So vast and vile that it has borne
Christ to this vale of anguish;
Son of a Virgin, sweet and mild
In poverty the Holy Child,
Thy substitute, did languish;
Behold, with faith, God’s only Son!
Come nigh and see what Love has done
To save thee from damnation;
The Father cast on Him thy guilt,
For thee His precious blood was spilt,
To bless thee with salvation.  Amen. 

Lent 5

John 8:46-59 - Judica, Lent V - March 17, 2013 

Seeing Death Aright

To be “of God” means to be born of God.  It means to have faith in God.   The Holy Spirit engenders faith in our hearts through the forgiveness of sins.  That’s how we are born of God.  We receive forgiveness by believing God’s word.  The power to give us new birth in the Sacrament of Baptism is nothing other than the command and promise of Jesus that through this Sacrament of water our sins are indeed forgiven and we are received as God’s dear children.  The power here again is in the words He speaks.  We benefit from Jesus’ words by believing Jesus’ words.  Through faith in Him, God rescues us from the sin and death that we have inherited from our father in the flesh, Adam.  And He gives to us by faith a new and better inheritance – it’s a spiritual inheritance with His eternal Son, and our Brother in the flesh, Jesus Christ.  He is the second Adam, the Perfect Man.  Who can convict Him of sin?  No one.  Not even God. 

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me, and know my anxieties;
And see if there is any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting. 

So wrote King David at the end of Psalm 139.  And yet only Jesus is able to say this with full confidence of impunity: search Me; try Me.  He says this to God!  And “which one of you,” He asked the Jews, “convicts Me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe Me?”  Jesus exposed their unbelief.  They couldn’t accuse Him of anything false He had either said or done, but they didn’t believe Him anyway.  And Jesus told them why: “Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” 

Lent 2

Matthew 15:21-28 - Reminiscere, Lent II - February 24, 2013 

Wrestling with God

Our Introit this morning comes from Psalm 25 and begins by asking God to remember His tender mercies and lovingkindnesses, for they are from of old.  That is to say that they are from a long time ago.  That’s why, I suppose, the Psalmist, who is King David here, asks God to remember them.  It’s not like God forgets.  He doesn’t.  We do.  We take them for granted.  We take advantage of our freedom under God’s grace.  We cave into fleshly lusts of various stripes, and so we forget who we are as children of God, redeemed by the blood of Christ.  We ignore God’s word to our peril, and so forget who God is as our merciful Father, reconciled by the propitiating sacrifice of His Son.  And as often as we in our sinful weakness forget, we ask God to remember.  We cry to God for mercy.  And this is what it means to be saved by grace through faith.  It means that God continue to recall and apply His promises of old.  And we continue to ask Him to.  We don’t ask for something new when we cry for mercy.  We ask for something old.  We ask for the same thing.  We ask that God once again, as He has already done so many countless times, open up and reveal His heart to us sinners, so that we might again know and believe His love for us.  And God remembers. 

I remember learning the German word for “remember.”  I’ll spare you the pronunciation of the word with its guttural R’s, but it’s a really neat word.  It literally means to bring something deep within yourself so as to be able to retrieve it at will.   It’s a helpful picture of what it means to remember. 

Lent 1

Matthew 4:1-11- Invocavit, Lent I - February 17, 2013

To Keep You in All Your Ways

The eternal Son of God became Man and placed Himself under the law to redeem humanity whom the law condemned. 

Jesus did not pretend to humble Himself.  He didn’t pretend to be an ordinary man in order to put on some sort of show of heroism and holiness.  No, He was truly humbled.  In His mercy and wisdom, He declined to make full use of His divine prerogatives as the eternal Son of God in order that He might, as a man, fulfill what we could not.  This is a mystery.  And it means not only that, although He was God, Jesus hungered and thirsted as a man—and that He got tired and slept.  It means also that, as a man, He trusted the word of God.  He trusted the word of God as one who needed the word of God, as one who had no strength apart from it.  He relied on it completely.  Jesus did not claim a relationship with the Father other than the relationship that the Father revealed by speaking His word.  Think of that! When Jesus prayed, He didn’t take a break from His state of humiliation in order to tap into some spiritual connection unavailable to you and me.  No.  He prayed as one who believed God’s promise to hear Him.  “Call upon Me in the day of trouble.  I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me” (Psalm 50:15).  Jesus believed this.  That’s why He prayed so much. 

And talk about the day of trouble.  Our Gospel lesson this morning sums up for us what trouble does—what trouble looks like when the devil’s wiles and cunning afflict the weakness of human flesh.   It wasn’t just a generic trouble that Jesus faced, like some obstacle course.  It was an attack specifically designed against the Son of God.  The attacks of the devil that Jesus faced are not the attacks that the unbelieving world experiences.  They are the attacks that only he experiences who can rightly call himself a child of God.  They are the temptations of a Christian.  The devil attacks those whom God has claimed. 

Quinquagesima

Luke 18:31-43 - Quinquagesima - February 10, 2013 

Faith Knows What It Wants

I remember when I was a kid, my parents chose the music in the car and so my siblings and I had no choice but to grow up on Oldies – you know, the music from the 50s and 60s.  I remember feeling like I was cut off from current pop-culture even as a young boy, because all my friends knew the bands and groups that were popular throughout the 90s, and like my parents, I was totally out of touch.  Now I suppose I never felt too deprived.  I still think that the music from my parents’ generation is about as good as it gets.  But I remember thinking that these old songs that I had grown up on were overly obsessed with singing about love.  And I remember being kind of embarrassed about it, like maybe my friends’ music was “cooler” than that.  But I eventually learned that it wasn’t just a 1960s thing.  Even the music from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the music that my friends were listening to, the music that your kids and grandkids are listening to today, is just as obsessed with the topic.  Love.  The problem is – and the more music you listen to the more you realize this: how little the world knows about love. 

Sexagesima

Luke 8:4-15 - Sexagesima - February 3, 2013 

What Do You Want to Hear?

God’s word is powerful.  The reason it is powerful is because it is God’s word.  He speaks it.  It goes forth from His mouth to accomplish what He pleases.  It isn’t powerful because of what we see it do.  No.  Rather, it has the power to save because of who says it.  It is God’s word.  God says it.  God saves.  He is almighty, and so His word accomplishes what He purposes to accomplish, and it succeeds in the thing for which He sends it … because it is His word.  And He is God.  We should listen to God’s word – not insofar as it saves us, or insofar as it otherwise appears to benefit us, but because God says it.  That settles it.

By God’s word the heavens and the earth were made.  This is the written record of Genesis 1.  As Psalm 33 attests: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.”   Think of all that stuff described by evolutionists on the Discovery Channel.  They display in such marvelous detail the amazing and beautiful wonders of creation.  And of course they give all the credit to random chance just to avoid reckoning with God … but still! — You can really learn a lot about the created world by listening to them, can’t you?  And yet, it wasn’t made by them.  Their scientific descriptions didn’t cause anything to be.  It was all made and it is all upheld still by the power of God’s almighty word alone.  I think this helps put things into perspective.  When you look at the natural world, it isn’t just God who made it; it is God who made it by speaking.  And He speaks to us.  Here; this morning.  God’s word is powerful. 

Our word, on the other hand, is not.  It is weak.  It is often false.  We say things and nothing happens.  We exaggerate things, but reality doesn’t change.  We promise things and vow to do things, and then we fail.  And so our words fail with us.