We live in a world that attempts to start moral cascades or moral panics all the time. The sermon hopefully demonstrates that and how they have sped up with social media. What the text does is both expose that this mechanism of the world has always been with us. And then it shows us what stops them. Or maybe if not stops them, it shows us how the gospel addresses them. Jesus turns their logic inside out. First, because the logic of a moral panic is the logic of contagion. We think we can stay righteous by excluding “sinners.” The gospel is only for sinners. Jesus came not for the righteous, but for sinners. Which we all are. The second way that Jesus and the gospel flips the world’s logic is that it is not the contagion that spread, but the healing. Christ eats with tax collectors and sinners. In Christ we have nothing to fear from the world. We are called like Matthew to follow Christ which is a dramatic change. But the gospel sends us out to offer the balm – the blood of Christ.
The Sunday is Trinity Sunday, so the Athanasian Creed is a fixture. We say it responsively, and the congregational response isn’t clear enough, so I’m sorry it isn’t on the recording. Although we had a new reader this morning who did a very good job with a very long reading in that Old Testament lesson.
So, the seed idea for this Sermon comes Professor Richard Beck. He is a prof at Abilene Christian, and I’ve been reading him for what seems like forever. I’d say that all his books are on my shelf, but most of them are in my Kindle along with all the underlines (145 over 4 books, the ones in the physical books I don’t have a count on.). Now we diverge in quite significant ways. He I think would still call himself a Progressive Christian, while I’m a confessional Lutheran. The difference is that most people who would use that label do so to avoid thinking. Dr. Beck is the opposite. You occasionally find these people who are close enough to you that you can think along with them fruitfully, but they are different enough to be challenging. That has been Dr. Beck to me. Anyway, in his most recent book – The Book of Love – he starts out with a couple of very powerful ideas.
The first you find embedded in the first part of this sermon that rests on the Old Testament lesson. The devil, the world and our sinful nature present us with an ontology of death. Life is the temporary accident. The Bible is the book of an ontology of life. Death is the temporary thing. Because in the beginning God is. And in the end, God is. That is the point of the first part of the Athanasian Creed. Father, Son and Holy Spirit eternal and coequal.
The second idea from Dr. Beck is that God – best seen in Jesus Christ – is for us. You can’t lose His love. The second part of the Athanasian creed presents this to us. So that by the time we get to those end statements on the judgement, we already know that the judge is in our corner. Which means we are free to go embrace and ontology and a teleology of life. We can go live it. Because God is for us.
The Holy Day was Pentecost – hence the red and the Holy Spirit. Both Pentecost and the Holy Spirit are parts of more staid Protestantism that tend to get forgotten or played down. And I think they tend that way for what this sermon attempts to address. What we really want is God in a Box. Whether that is because we would like personally a God who does what we want, or whether we are protecting God’s reputation from losers and unsavory acts, we can find ourselves like Joshua telling God to “stop it.” The problem there is that the Holy Spirit does what He wants when He wants. And if your theology can’t handle that, as the kids say, it’s not going to make it. The flip side of that is faith, that God loves you, and if this is how the Spirit is acting it must be for your eternal good.
Glory is not something that we Lutherans talk about all that much. The Reformed talk about it much more while the world talks about it all the time. But that is the subject of Jesus’ prayer. Both in terms of the Father and Son glorifying each other, and in terms of the son glorifying his own and how they glorify him. So this sermon attempts to give a biblical framework for thinking about glory and contrasts it largely with the worldly conception of glory. And then it tries to hold out a way that we can live with this glory – a treasure in jars of clay. For any who know this sermon owes a debt to C.S. Lewis’ essay “The Weight of Glory” although it is not just a complete rip-off. His essay is longer and more complete. This sermon is more tightly focused.
There are sermons that bubble up from things that take place during the week. Even the day before you commit them to paper. And then there are those that are the considered reflection of a long span of time. This one might have been sprung on me late in the week, but it is one of the second type. The text is Paul in Athens. And Paul in Athens is such a rich text. Why this is one of those long simmering preparation sermons is because the way this text has influenced the church that I have spent most of my adult life in I am convinced has been dramatically wrong. If you just say “Mars Hill” in church-y circles, there is an assumed theology. And just because two places that adopted the name blew-up, doesn’t mean the theology met its end.
The sermon examines that theology. Attempts to point out its fatal flaw. Proclaims what the necessary corrective is. But also must admit that in the conflict with the world, the world can be very attractive. People of their own volition can choose the world. And that maybe they want to. It’s a bit complicated, but I believe it can be meaningful to those who have turned away from the world and toward the Spirit.
The text ends with what I personally think is one of the toughest sayings in the bible. “You will do greater works than these” along with the promise to ask anything and it will be given. Any fair presentation has to establish what works are being talked about such that the promise could be true. The question about prayer is a little easier and most people will accept answers like “well, if you ask for a knife, because you are going to kill someone, that isn’t likely to be answered yes by God.” But saying that those who believe will do greater works than Jesus is much tougher.
The lead up to this saying is about who exactly Jesus is and what works – or maybe I should say work – he is doing. And that work is primarily filling up his Father’s house. The work Jesus is doing is calling people back into a right relationship with God – with the Father. And that is where the sermon starts. And it builds from there through the conversation that Jesus has with Thomas and Philip. A conversation that I think is almost natural and deeply enlightening. As well as full of good news.
Easter 4 is Good Shepherd sunday. The readings always come from John 10. In year A we get the first part of it. Two “Amen. Amen” or “Truly. Truly” sayings of Jesus. The sheep are present and there is talk about shepherds, but it’s a long chapter. This early part is a bit more polemical. There are shepherds and their are thieves and robbers who only want to kill and destroy. There are those who hear the voice of the shepherd, and unremarked but the binary demands it, there are those who follow the voice of strangers who are not the sheep.
So this ends up being something of a meditation on evangelism. In Jesus’ framing evangelism is simply the voice of the shepherd – the true shepherd, eventually the good shepherd. And the sheep – the true sheep – know the voice of the shepherd. Evangelism is a proclamation. And that is what this sermon meditates on a bit. How it is the proclamation to each individual. “Your sins are many and great. But I have paid them. Follow me.” And you either know that voice, or your don’t.
The Road to Emmaus is one of the most evocative stories in scripture. It has some echoes of the Old Testament and the “Messianic Secret” in the line “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” It also fits in perfectly with Luke’s love of travel narratives. We are always on the way somewhere. But for me – and liturgically coming on Easter 3 it plays into this – it is a post-resurrection appearance that deals with knowing. How do we know? In that way it can be something of a Lukan Thomas story. Except where as John’s answer is the beatitude – “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” – which plays into John’s love of sight metaphors, Luke’s answer has some layers. I pull in John Wesley’s quadrilateral which in the way it gets used might be the most misused theological framework. I touch on that in the sermon a bit. Wesley had an answer to “How do you know?” It was roughly: Revelation, Tradition, Experience and Reason. And at least how I think it should be taken that order is a hierarchy. Scripture or Revelation is the bedrock. Tradition, something that is ever growing, is the witness of the saints and ages. It illumines the fullness of scripture. Experience is how these intersect with our lives. And the last, reason, is really teaching our fallen self to see God at work. They aren’t separate ways of knowing that are weighed against each other. They work together. And as the sermon develops the text, Jesus walks the pair on the road to Emmaus from experience through tradition and back to the Scriptures. And then they are prepared to see.
The 2nd Sunday of Easter always has the Gospel Text of the Apostle Thomas. There are two things that you can preach from this text. 1) The Office of the Keys. And I touch on that at the start. 2) Figure out something to say about doubt. And that is the tougher one. Mainline Protestantism – which the LCMS is both part of and not part of – for a generation plus has glorified doubt. Which is a terrible misreading of this text and what the bible consistently has to say about it. It is not that the Bible denies doubt. In fact as I’ll build in the sermon, it isn’t just Thomas. Everyone has some significant doubt. But doubt is a childish thing. If you are going to accomplish anything – if you are going to have life – you are going to have faith. They, faith and doubt, aren’t opposites. Doubt is a valid starting point that must give way when proof is offered. It could give way to knowledge. It could give way to accomplishment. It can give way to faith. Doubt is the starting childish position that matures into something real. The Introit for the day really starts off with the theme – “Like Newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation.” (In Latin that is Quasimodogenidi, the famed Hunchback was born on this Sunday and so called Quasimodo.) Jesus tells Thomas to “stop being faithless and believe.” That is a maturing faith. One that stops with childish things and believes.
Easter is a day for pure proclamation. He is risen. Death and Hell have been defeated. And Chrysostom’s Easter sermon has been the model ever since he himself preached it in the 4th century.
This is mostly stolen with some adaptions for the texts we read today (Jeremiah instead of Isaiah) and for 21st century idiom. Which honestly I was surprised at how little of that updating there was. Sixteen centuries and half a world away, it still preaches.
