Holy Trinity Sunday (Series B: John 3:1-17)

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this Sunday of the Holy Trinity is from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the third chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John. Dear friends in Christ, Holy Trinity Sunday has a tendency to be a bit confusing. The Gradual for this day declares: “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable.” After we confess the Athanasian Creed this morning, I think you will all heartily agree. I am of the opinion that only pastors and vicars actually like reciting this creed, and I think we all have this plot brewing to confess it every month, if not every week. Some may say that this is because you need a seminary education to understand the Trinity, but I would disagree. All a seminary education gives you is a shelf full of books about the doctrine of the Trinity, where everyone pretty much says, “we don’t get it either.” But there is a great difference between knowing the ins and outs of the Trinity and simply confessing what the Bible tells us. In the Athanasian Creed we will confess, “The Father is one person, the Son is another, and the Holy Spirit is another. But the Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is one.” That’s not any kind of math I’m used to, but that it what Scripture teaches us.

Humans quite simply don’t understand God, in fact, we cannot. On the other hand, Jesus has us figured out, as John tells us right before our text: “[Jesus] Himself knew what was in man.” Just in case we don’t believe John’s testimony about Jesus, we are given an example. “Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with Him.’” Nicodemus has some flattering words, but he doesn’t know what he is getting himself into. The answers of Jesus leave Him befuddled, all of His great intelligence and standing before the people counts as nothing before Jesus. “Jesus answered him, ‘Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?’” He is in the same boat as the rest of us. Humans cannot understand the mystery of God, we are unable to probe the depths of His mind, and the effort often leaves us confused and frustrated.

Why is this? Jesus tells Nicodemus in our text. “That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” We have been born in the flesh, the sinful corrupted flesh that was given to us by all who came before. This sin, which clings to us like a disease, not only keeps us from understanding God, it keeps us from knowing Him in the first place. We are born separated from God, unable by any effort of our own to come to Him or know Him. But this separation is not just one of knowledge, as if we could go to the library and fix it. This is a real, physical separation. God created man to be in fellowship with Him, but our sin continues to push Him away. We cannot come to God, but we can and do make the gap wider and wider- with every lie, every evil thought, every moment of hatred toward others, every time we profane His Name. Our focus is in the wrong place, as Jesus said: “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” Our sinful selves are focused on earthly things, the things of this world, rather than on heaven. The concerns of our lives on this earth so often drown out any concern about the things of God. Isn’t that how the world tells us to live, with our eyes focused on the ground, on our wants here in this world? The teachings of Christ about the Trinity mean little to the world, because it does not see our real needs- that we have a sin problem, we have a death problem, we have a hell problem.

To solve those problems, to fulfill those needs, the only needs that matter in eternity, the doctrine of the Trinity is indispensible, because for our salvation, the Trinity sprang into action. We will confess in a few moments: “We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance.” The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in relationship together, an intimate relationship that is incomprehensible to the human mind. But Jesus declares, “Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.” Jesus of Nazareth, who appeared to human reason as simply a man, had a window into that relationship, for He was a part of it. He was true God and true man, the Second person of the Trinity. “No one has ascended into heaven except Him who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” They are three distinct persons, yet one God. We can spend all day trying to figure out how one God could be three distinct persons, but here we simply confess what we have been given to confess- that the three persons of the Trinity work in relationship to accomplish our salvation.

God saw our corrupted state, that we could neither understand Him nor come to Him, that we were born separated from Him and condemned to death, and He acted. And He acted in love. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” The first person of the Trinity sent the Second person into our creation, Jesus Christ became man for us and our salvation, that man and God may no longer be separated. “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.” But the Incarnation was not victory in itself. Jesus had come to deal with our sin problem, our death problem, and our hell problem, and to do that He needed to defeat them all by offering Himself in our place. “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him might have eternal life.” Moses crafted a bronze serpent, the very embodiment of the punishment for the people’s sin, and placed it high upon a pole. This bronze serpent had no poison in itself, but instead all who were bitten would look to it and live. Jesus Christ, who bore our very flesh, but yet without the poison of sin, allowed Himself to be taken up high upon the pole of the cross. There He gave His life, there He shed His blood, there He endured the abandonment of God for our sin. Jesus was in that intimate relationship of the Trinity, but on the cross, God turned His back upon Christ, unleashing hell upon Him for us. And with His wounds we are healed, with His blood our sin is atoned for, with His death, death itself is defeated, and with His resurrection, we have the promise of eternal life.

But Jesus’ death and resurrection would mean nothing if the benefits were not brought to us. For this task, the Third person of the Trinity would be sent. In our text, Nicodemus tries to butter Jesus up with some flattering remarks about their admiration for His teaching. But Jesus goes right to the heart of the matter. “Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’” We were born with the corrupted flesh that we inherited from our parents, indeed from our first parents, Adam and Eve. We were barred from the kingdom of God and condemned to death. In love the Father sent the Son, who accomplished salvation, and then the Father and Son send the Holy Spirit, who brings people into the kingdom of the Son. And He does this by giving us a new birth. “Nicodemus said to Him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’”

In our physical birth we received the inheritance of sin, and so we needed a different birth to give to us the inheritance of salvation. “Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.’” In Baptism, we are washed with water and given the gift of the Holy Spirit. There the Spirit does His work of bringing us the gifts Christ won for us, of making us new. We are given in Baptism the rebirth in the Spirit, a new birth of life that brings us into Christ’s promises, into the kingdom He established with His blood. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Through Baptism we are given a new birth, a birth from above by water and the Spirit, we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit and the promise of the forgiveness of sins. We are baptized into the fellowship of the Trinity- it is no surprise that Jesus instructs us to baptize in that Name: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Through Baptism, the new birth of the Spirit, we are made children of God, God is now our Father, as Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer. That is what characterizes our eternal existence- intimate fellowship with the Triune God. But though we are born of the Spirit, we do not therefore reject our bodies. Our flesh is a good gift of God, and He will raise it up and renew it as well on the last day. That is the promise that we have through Baptism, that all of us, body and soul, will dwell with Christ forever in heaven.

Nicodemus, after hearing of the miracle of Baptism, that God would give life to sinful people through the washing of the water with the Word, asks “How can these things be?” But Jesus has already given him the answer: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” The Spirit works as the Lord has ordained, and He works in mysterious ways, bringing people the blessings Christ won through simple words, water, bread and wine. And so, even with the birth of the Spirit in Baptism, the things of God still remain mysterious. We will not be able to completely understand the Trinity, we will not be able to fully comprehend how God could become man and accomplish salvation, nor how the Holy Spirit could use such ordinary means to bring us salvation. We remain in the flesh, and so we confess what we have been given to confess from the Scriptures. And the Scriptures teach us to confess what we cannot see, what we cannot fully understand, that the Father sent His Son to accomplish salvation, and the Father and Son sent the Spirit to deliver His gifts to us. That is where we place our confidence- on what Scripture has taught us, what Jesus has taught us, and what we will confess in the Athanasian Creed. We believe in the Triune God that created us, defeated our enemies for us, and gave to us a new birth through the washing of the water with the Word. May the Triune God, the only true God, strengthen and preserve you in that baptismal faith until life everlasting, Amen.

The Day of Pentecost (Series B: Ezekiel 37:1-14)

“And you shall know that I AM the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this Pentecost Day is from the Old Testament lesson read a few moments ago from the thirty-seventh chapter of the prophet Ezekiel. Dear friends in Christ, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. But God spoke, and things began to happen. With the power of His Word He brought forth light, He separated waters, He caused plants to sprout, and animals to teem in the sky, on the land, and in the sea. His Word brought the stars into existence, with the sun and the moon. All things came to be through the power of His Word, but the greatest miracle was yet to come. “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” He who had no life in himself, who was only a pile of dirt, became a living person with a blast of wind from God’s nostrils, God put into man the breath of life. And God took a rib from the man, this mound of dirt made alive by the power of God’s life giving breath, and made woman. Adam said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.”

They were united together as man and woman, as husband and wife. And together, they plunged into rebellion. All the gifts that God had given, every good thing brought forth by the power of His Word, even the very gift of the breath of life, was not enough. They wanted more. They wanted to run the show, they wanted to be like God. And so they betrayed God, they disobeyed Him, and they condemned each of their offspring to lives as enemies of God. We are the children of Adam and Eve, we too want to be like God, to run our lives our own way, without His interference or His rules. The wonderful life that God has given us to live is too stifling for us, we think we know better. And so we live our lives our own way, indulging in secret or even public sin, wallowing in thoughts, words, and deeds that thumb our noses at our creator.

And so those created by God, those breathing the very breath of life, wither away. For as hard as we may even try to follow the commands of God, the fact remains that we are estranged from our creator, cut off from His life-giving nourishment. "The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry." Ezekiel sees the results. He sees what humanity’s sin, the sin inherited from Adam and Eve and added to by us, has led to- dry bones, cut off from water. Not alive, in fact the very opposite of alive. These bones are dead, they have very little that would demonstrate that they have ever been alive. And they are left unburied, subject to the elements, subject to the curse. Ezekiel knows that in his day bones were only left unburied as a sign of a curse, and He knows that the curse over all humanity is that of death. “And He said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ And I answered, ‘O Lord God, you know.’”

God’s question is ridiculous, and Ezekiel answers the only way he can. Of course these bones cannot live. They cannot pick themselves up and grow flesh and skin and become people again. Bones, dry bones, cursed bones quite simply don’t do those sorts of things. They cannot even move without help, because they are dead. This is the plight of mankind- God quotes His people, they say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost, we are completely cut off.” But yet Ezekiel cannot leave it with a simple and emphatic ‘no’- he is speaking with the Lord of all creation, the Lord who created life in the first place by mounding up some dirt and breathing. “O Lord God, you know.”

God did know. God knew that He would soon send someone to give life to dead bones, one who would take the very plight of man and make it His own. This one is the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God Himself taking on human flesh and dwelling amongst dry bones. The people cried out to God for deliverance, saying, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.” Jesus Christ came to allow His bones to be dried up in the dust of death, as He cries in Psalm 22: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.” He came to allow his hope to be seemingly lost. He came to be completely cut off from the Father as He cries out from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He came to do all this for He had come to rescue sinful, condemned, and cursed people from death. He came to take on their sin, your sin and my sin, and take it to the cross. He came to defeat death and make dry bones alive. His mission was to suffer everything, even the very abandonment of God, and die for you, me, and all people. He came to the valley of dry bones, and He saw the humanity He loved, you and me, enslaved to death and ensnared in its curse. We were dry bones, unable to raise ourselves up, but He came for our salvation, He came to give life to us. And He did this by giving up His life, by allowing His body to be broken and destroyed, by laying Himself in the dust of death. But God brought Him forth from an open grave. “Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people.”

The Lord asked Ezekiel, “‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ And I answered, ‘O Lord God, you know.’” God knew that His Son would come to reconcile the Creator with His creation, He knew that Jesus Christ would die on the cross, facing the wrath and abandonment of God for dead and dying people. And He knew that Christ would rise triumphant and then go out to make dry bones live. But He does not answer Ezekiel, He simply demonstrates. “Then He said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the Word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.” The Word goes forth from Christ and those whom He appointed to proclaim that Word, and it goes forth to give life to dry bones, bones which could not give themselves life. “So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them.”
There is a problem- these bones had formed bodies, just as God formed the man from the dust of the earth, but they were not alive. One thing remained- a promise, a promise that was fulfilled on this day. “When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.” The wind came, and it brought the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift long foretold, a gift that would make dead, dry bones alive. "Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live." So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army."

God recreated His people through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the one who brings the very benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection near to dead and dying people, near to you and me. Through the power of Christ’s word, the Holy Spirit breathed into your nostrils the very breath of life. You were joined to Christ, made His, a participant in the redemption that He won. You who were dead were made alive through Jesus Christ and His Word, which the promised Holy Spirit brought to you.

God recreates through the redemption of His Son, and then we follow the pattern of Jesus. Christ opened the grave as the firstfruits of the resurrection, and now we are part of the harvest to come. “Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people.” God asked Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” The answer is: ‘Yes, through the redemption of Christ by His death and resurrection, these bones can live, and they can live forever!”
You and I are destined to join that ‘great army’ that Ezekiel sees, the great company of the ones redeemed by the blood of Christ, the ones resurrected to live before the throne of the Lamb forever. “The breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.” We are those who will receive the heavenly inheritance, the new heavens and new earth, the new Israel given to those redeemed by Christ’s blood. The Holy Spirit has made you alive through the Word of Christ and His sacraments, and now you await the day on which you follow Christ’s resurrection with your own. “And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I AM the Lord.” The Spirit was given to us on this day, the day of Pentecost, the day on which Christ fulfilled His promises and sent the Comforter, the one who will bring Jesus to us each and every day until the day of Resurrection. On that day we will join Christ forever in the resurrection life, standing before Him in heavenly glory for all eternity. May our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ work through the Holy Spirit to give you the confidence in God’s promises, that you may believe Him when He says, “I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.” Amen.

Seventh Sunday of Easter (Series B: John 17:11b-19)

“Holy Father, keep them in your Name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this seventh and final Sunday of Easter is from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John. Dear friends in Christ, always pay attention to the Collect. This little prayer, said towards the end of our service today and printed in your bulletin, is supposed to be a summary of the entire service. A good Collect will bring together all the themes of the day from the Introit, the Gradual, the First Reading, the Epistle, and the Gospel, giving you an excellent synopsis of what I should be talking about from up here. Today’s Collect is especially good: “O King of glory, Lord of hosts, uplifted in triumph far above all heavens, leave us not without consolation but send the Spirit of truth whom You promised from the Father; for You live and reign with Him and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever, Amen.” Do you see what is happening here? The Collect has set the context for this Sunday- last Thursday was Ascension Day, when the disciples saw Jesus disappear as He was lifted up high into the sky. We are tempted to think we are left alone, but wait, Jesus has promised a Comforter, the Holy Spirit who will bring Jesus to us. And for that Comforter, for Pentecost, the disciples wait, and we wait with them.

But waiting is not easy. We know that Pentecost is next week, we know that the first Pentecost was just shy of two thousand years ago, and yet we still wait. We wait for Christ to return, to fulfill His promises by making all things new. And while we wait, the Scriptures tell us we will face hardship. Our Gospel lesson comes from Maundy Thursday, and on that evening Jesus was especially concerned with what His followers will face while they waited. Before our text He tells us: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” We live, we wait in a world that despises us and the Gospel that has been delivered to us. They rejected Christ as Israel rejected her prophets, and having rejected the Master, they have few qualms about roughing up His servants. As He is preparing to travel to the cross, Jesus is giving us a reality check. We will face persecution, we will face rejection, we will face the hatred of the world because we belong to Christ, because of the hope that fills us. This is not some pessimistic prediction; for Jesus, this is simply reality.

When faced with the hatred of the world, there are two options that Christians are tempted to run toward. The first is simply giving up the faith. The history of the Church is sadly filled with people who abandoned what was given to them by Christ at the first sign of persecution. The way of the world looks so much easier, so much more carefree, than a life lived under the cross, facing hatred and rejection from even friends and family. That is where Satan wants us, that is where the world wants us, that is the goal of their persecution. You and I are tempted so often and so hard to simply give up, to take the easy path, to remove the stigma and burden of the name ‘Christian’ from us.

But Satan is still pretty pleased when we choose the second option- compromise. We see it all around us in the Christian Church today, that when faced with the hatred of the world, church bodies and individual Christians simply cave in. We saw it when women’s ordination became a big issue decades ago (it still is today), and church bodies simply followed the tide of culture rather than the truth of Scripture. We see it today as homosexuality finds acceptance even in our churches, when a bishop of the Anglican Church is an advocate for a lifestyle that is clearly condemned by the Word of God. Many Christians even support abortion, the heinous destruction of human life declared unwanted by our world. But before we point the finger at all those other Christians, at those so called ‘liberal’ church bodies, we need to look at ourselves. How often have we allowed the world to set the agenda for our life of prayer and worship, determining when and how often we commune with our Lord and Savior? Are we even shocked anymore by the transgressions of God’s command to ‘not commit adultery’ on our televisions, in our schools, or in our communities, as students ‘hook up’ and adults live together before marriage? How often do we look the other way when someone’s name is slandered through gossip or rumor? And our culture of entitlement has influenced us so much that we so often dictate our agenda to God and His Church. In these and countless other ways we have let the world’s agenda seep into our own lives, because standing against the world’s hatred is a lonely and tough task.

Jesus knows this. He knows that we will be hated by the world- He has told us that clearly- and He knows that we will be tempted to fall away, that we will be tempted to compromise. And so what does He do? He prays. The account of Maundy Thursday in the book of John is five chapters long, and in four of those chapters Jesus is speaking words of warning, the reality check we spoke of before. But He also speaks words of comfort, and He promises the gift of the Holy Spirit, for whom we wait this Sunday between Ascension and Pentecost. Having told us all these things, the good, the bad, and the ugly, in that fifth and final chapter Jesus takes all those who believe in Him to the Father’s throne of grace, He holds all of us up in prayer.

“Holy Father, keep them in your Name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.” Jesus prays that the Name of the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, might be placed on all people. This is the Name above all names, the Name that gave salvation time and again to Israel, and now it would be connected to a much greater act of salvation. Jesus is praying on the eve of the Day of Salvation that the benefits of His death and resurrection would be applied to all people. “Sanctify them in the truth, your Word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.”

Christ was sent into this world, this world of sin and corruption, a world in rebellion against its creator, a world that would reject the very Son of God, to make unclean people holy again. We were all filthy with sin, covered with that uncleanness that had separated us from God from the moment of conception. But Jesus Christ, the Holy One of God, consecrated Himself, He set Himself aside as the One to make all people holy again. He was sent to cleanse all through His shed blood, and after finishing this great prayer, He would go forth to the Mount of Olives to accomplish that for which He was sent. For the next morning was Good Friday, the day on which Christ consecrated Himself for the task of giving His life on the cross, the Holy One nailed to the tree to make all people holy. For when His blood flowed from His hands, His feet, His head, His back, and then from His side, it flowed to cleanse all people. And when He rose again, He rose to show He had overcome every source of our uncleanness, He rose to “sanctify them in the truth.” Jesus prays in our text that this victory, this salvation, this cleansing may be extended to all people through the Word of God, “that they may be one, even as we are one.”

We are those who have been cleansed by the Word, we are the ones who have had the Name of salvation, the Divine Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit placed on us in our Baptism, and Christ prays that we may be kept in that Name. “Holy Father, keep them in your Name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” Christ prays for us, for you and me, that we might not fall away from this faith, this salvation delivered to us. What comfort this is, that Jesus prays for you and me constantly that our faith may be strengthened and preserved, that we may be kept in the baptismal Name given to us. Amidst the hatred of this world, we need this assurance, we need Christ’s prayer. “I have given them your Word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.” Christ prays for us, He holds us up in prayer that we may not compromise with the world, that we may be protected from the assaults of Satan. But we all know that we fall so often in this area, and so our Lord and Savior prays: “Sanctify them in the truth, your Word is truth.” He prays that through the power of God’s Word, our sins would be forgiven, washed away by His blood applied to us each and every time that we hear the beautiful message that “your sins are forgiven,” whether in His Word, in Absolution, or in the feast of His Body and Blood. And He prays that the Holy Spirit would continually work in our lives to make us more and more holy, living a life apart from the sin of this world and bathed in the forgiveness of Christ. And this is the life of true joy, living in the forgiveness of Christ, the hope that fills us despite anything we may face. “But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves.”

We live with the joy of Christ because He died and rose again for us and we live with the joy of Christ because He bathes our lives with forgiveness by applying what He won directly to you and me. But we also live with the joy of Christ because He stands at this very moment before the Father praying specifically for you and me, because He is performing His great work as our intercessor before the Father, praying for us. It is only with the prayers of Christ that the people claimed by Christ’s blood can live in a hostile world. The Church then exists distinct from the world, as an oasis of forgiveness in a desert of sin, as the place where life is given to dying people, as the location where God delivers his very gifts to you and me. The Church is where, as we heard in our first lesson today: “All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer.” May the Lord sustain you through His prayers for you each and every day as you wait for His return in this world, enabling you to stand and forgiving you when you fall, Amen.

Ascension Day (observed)

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this Sunday on which we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord is from the first lesson read a few moments ago from the first chapter of Acts. Dear friends in Christ, Theophilus is an odd name. Now, perhaps when you compare it to many of the other names that you find in Scripture it doesn’t seem quite so strange, but on the other hand you aren’t going to run off and name your child Theophilus. Maybe your dog, but probably not your kid. But despite its oddity, Theophilus is an important name. Some theologians believe that this was the name of Luke’s benefactor, the one who provided the means for him to write his Gospel and the book of Acts, his ‘sponsor’ so to speak. Others say that this is a generic name by which Luke addresses all Christians. Theophilus literally means either ‘lover of God’ or else ‘one loved by God.’ Either way, such a name is an apt description of Christians. Not only are we those who love God, but we love God precisely and only because He first loved us. So, whether Luke is acknowledging his sponsor, who happens to have a cool name, or he is using a generic name for you and me, we can place ourselves right there in the first verse of our text.

“In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.” Those loved by God who are assembled here today, Luke is referring you back to the story of Jesus. He is the one who records the account of Christmas with all of its beauty, shepherds, angels, and all the rest. Throughout Luke’s Gospel, he records the teaching of Jesus, teachings that make it increasingly clear that it wasn’t Jesus’ intension simply to inspire Christmas cards, but instead to rid the earth of sin. It was His job to cleanse fallen creation, to take on Satan directly and crush Him underfoot, to make all things new. He did that through His proclamation and through His miracles- every person He restored to health was another part of creation made new once again. And He did this for you, because He loved you. You are those who have been loved by God, you are all Theophilus through the work of the Son. But His work was not yet complete.

Those beloved by God, Jesus Christ came for an ultimate and final cleansing, He came to deliver you from the clutches of sin. Luke writes, “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when He was taken up, after He had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom He had chosen.” His last instructions were about the Holy Spirit, and then Jesus marched forth to fulfill His Father’s will, to fulfill His love for you. For on Good Friday, He was taken up upon a cross, He was hung there to die, to be mocked and humiliated by men and abandoned by God. He was taken up high above the people so that all may see the price that He paid for us. My friends, each and every one of you is a Theophilus, one loved by God, one loved by Christ. He loved you so much that He willingly took on death, hell, and Satan, conquering them by the cross. There He wiped every sin out, on that day all the earth was cleansed. The death of Jesus delivered you, me, and all people from our sin, with His blood we are cleansed, our debt is erased, and the gap between God and man is closed.

But if Christ remained in the tomb, we would still be in our sins, and so Luke boldly declares: “To them He presented Himself alive after His suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Christ came to the disciples alive, resurrected, in victory over the grave. He gave them the proof they needed to take this proclamation of victory out throughout the world, so that all people might say: Alleluia, Jesus is risen! He is risen indeed, alleluia! You have been loved by God because Christ rose for you, He rose to give you life, He rose to give you victory, He rose to point to our resurrection on the Last Day. He rose, and for forty days He dwelt with His apostles, His friends, eating and drinking the foretaste of the heavenly banquet to come.

And now that time was almost over. The twelve disciples had spent three years with their Lord, and many perhaps even knew Him before that time. They had shared everything with Him, good and bad, the teachings and the opposition, and they all had the terrible memory of abandoning Him on Maundy Thursday. They had traveled with Him literally to death and then were witnesses of His triumph over the grave. But now they weren’t quite sure what came next. You can imagine the disciples thinking, “This can’t last forever, something is going to happen.”

That thought prompts a question. “So when they had come together, they asked Him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus had to be waiting around for something, and it seemed quite logical that He was preparing for His final military campaign. They were looking forward to having Him walking with them as they gloriously and victoriously conquered the world. But there is a problem- Christ has not promised such things: “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority.”
Instead, He leaves us, rising into heaven until a cloud covers Him. Now our hopes are dashed. Christ is gone, He is up in heaven, far away, disconnected from us. We are now truly and honestly alone. That is why the disciples stand there and look. “And while they were gazing into heaven as He went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?’” By all appearances, Jesus has left us. Sadly, on Ascension Day, that is the opinion of too many Christians, even you and I are tempted to think that way as well. Jesus is simply a far away figure, someone who lived and died a long time ago, but now has little bearing on our lives. Isn’t that how we often live our lives- as if Christ is far away? And then to have a truly ‘spiritual’ experience, we must then climb the ladder to heaven and meet Him there. Our Collect for today even teaches this: “may we also ascend in heart and mind and continually dwell there with Him.” If Jesus has locked Himself away in heaven, and it is up to us to ascend to Him, we are doomed. How can we keep the faith, how can we love God, if He has left us? Our hearts cannot come to Jesus, they cannot ascend to Him, because they are full of sin and corruption, the corruption that has filled us since our birth. If Ascension Day is goodbye, then we are left without hope, we are left alone!

Jesus responds to this dilemma in an unexpected way. He points us to a promise He had made many times before: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” Then He leaves. “And when He had said these things, as they were looking on, He was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight.” In a moment, Jesus is gone. He is no longer visibly present, and as the angels tell the disciples, He will not be again until He returns. “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven.” But my friends, those who are loved by God in Christ, Jesus is still present. He has told us how right in our text. It is now the work of the Holy Spirit to bring Jesus to us. That is why Jesus points us over and over to that promise. The disciples are worried that Jesus was going to leave them, and the promise for you and me today is that He is closer to us now than He ever was during His life on this earth.

“For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” On Pentecost the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles, and He came for the express purpose of bringing Jesus to His people. Jesus loves you and me so much that He did not leave us on this earth, but instead He comes to us through the work of the Spirit each and every day to strengthen our faith and forgive our sins, to deliver the very benefits of His death and resurrection directly to us. Christ is still present among us, only in a different and much more wonderful way! The two angels asked the disciples: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?” We do not stand gazing into the sky to look for Christ, we do not have to bring our hearts and minds to heaven as the Collect wrongly says today, but instead Christ comes to us, and He comes bearing His gifts and bringing His grace near to us. He comes in the Word read and proclaimed; He comes in the Lord’s Supper, where He dines with us as He dined with the disciples. He comes as the crucified and risen one, with His arms open in blessing, washing us clean from our sin and giving us life everlasting.

For that is the great message of this day. The entire Jesus, body and soul, His human nature and His divine nature, have been enthroned in heaven, to sit beside God forever. And through His death, the first taking-up of Jesus, this second taking-up points to our future. As those who have been loved by God, loved so much that He was willing to shed His very blood for you and me, we will join Christ with our renewed, restored, and resurrected bodies on that final day. Christ redeemed and enthroned our human nature through His death, resurrection, and Ascension, reversing the corruption that occurred in the garden. What we have to look forward to is the visible presence of our enthroned Lord forever!

And so we wait for that day. This characterizes our entire Christian life. Christ’s visible presence has ended for now, and we await His return as the angels promised: “This Jesus, who was taken from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven.” But yet our Christian waiting is different than any other kind of waiting in this world. For we wait with the promise that Christ is among us right now, that He comes to us each and every day bearing the gifts He won for us, that He is intimately in communion with us in Lord’s Supper, that He joins us with Him in our Baptism. He comes to us and sustains us as we wait, until we see that day of ultimate victory. May the Lord sustain each and every one of you on this pilgrimage, as we wait for the promise to be fulfilled, Amen.

Third Sunday of Easter (Series B: Luke 24:36-49)

“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this third Sunday of Easter is from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Luke. Dear friends in Christ, Peter was in his element. In our First lesson for today, this one-time fisherman was given the opportunity to proclaim the word of God, and He did so with a boldness that makes even us uncomfortable: “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him. But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead.” Jesus, the great teacher from Nazareth, was not dead, but alive! And not only this, but this Jesus was not simply a great teacher, or only a man, but instead He was God in the flesh, the God of the Old Testament patriarchs come to save you and me. And He saved us by giving up His life and rising from the dead. Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!

What a difference between the boldness of Peter and what we see in our Gospel lesson for today! “As they were talking about these things, Jesus Himself stood among them, and said to them, ‘Peace to you!’ But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit.” The disciples were cowering in their locked room, listening to the confession of the Emmaus road disciples, that Jesus had made Himself known to them in the breaking of the bread. They were confused, perplexed by this turn of events, but this was only the beginning of the emotional roller coaster they were preparing to ride. When Jesus suddenly appeared among them, this confusion was replaced with terror and fear. They thought He was a ghost! They hadn’t thought that He would truly rise, and they did not expect a flesh-and-bones Jesus to appear in their midst. Jesus tries to allay their fear, but this rollercoaster was heading downhill in a hurry. “He showed them His hands and His feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling…” Even after they see the wounds of their Lord, they still disbelieve! This was too good to be true, and their emotions and feelings cannot handle it, they are left with scales on their eyes, unable to see the reality standing right in front of them. Jesus has risen!

But Jesus knows that it is not just a rollercoaster of emotion that has their minds closed. “And He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your hearts?” The word translated here as ‘doubts’ simply refers to the operation of human reason. Their minds are trying to figure this out, trying to get a grip on what their eyes are telling them. Humanity has always thought more highly of its reason that it ought. The first question from the garden was “did God really say?” and you know, when Adam and Eve thought about it, He probably didn’t. We live in an age when there seems to be no bounds to what humans can do when they put their minds to it. Science and technology are doing things that we never thought were possible, and many believe that we can probe the very origins of life and the universe. Science thinks that it can discount God, or at least make Him irrelevant, and when we live in a world with such man-made wonders, it is easy to see God in that way. On the other end of the spectrum are those who think that we experience God individually, with our own minds. We should just go out to the woods and there we can encounter Him. Once again, this focuses on the use of our own natural reason. Now, there is no doubt that some solitude is good for our souls, but can we learn all that we need to know about God from nature? Can science and our own human reason reveal God to us?

The answer that Scripture gives to us is a resounding ‘NO!’ Our emotions, swinging back and forth, cannot reveal God to us. They simply leave us as confused as the disciples. “But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit.” Looking at creation can lead us to see a Creator at work, but do we have any idea whether He loves us or not? Our own human reason, and its creations, science and technology, can try to give an explanation for everything, but it cannot probe the mind of God. No, by ourselves, with our own human reason, we are blind and deaf- we cannot see or hear Him. Why is that? Because our reason is perverted by sin, just as the rest of us is. We are born into sin, spiritually blind, deaf, and dead before God.

“And when they were talking about these things, Jesus Himself stood among them.” Into their very midst, into this collection of spiritually blind and deaf people, Jesus Christ came. He came to remove spiritual blindness, to replace doubt, the reasonings of sinful human minds, with faith. “And He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.” Those last words are a weak translation- Jesus says, ‘See my hands and my feet, that I AM myself.’ The great I AM, Yahweh Himself, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was standing in their midst. As Thomas said last week, this was “My Lord and my God!” And He stood amongst them alive- whole, bodily, physical, real! He was not a ghost as they feared: “Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when they still persisted in unbelief, He gave them another proof: “He said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave Him a piece of broiled fish, and He took it and ate before them.” This was their Lord, their Savior, the great I AM, the same God who delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt was standing among them, there to destroy all doubt, all of human reason’s feeble attempts to understand Him. He was there to create faith in His Resurrection, for these men would be witnesses of it to the ends of the earth.

And so these men needed some more education. Jesus opened up the Scriptures to them and then to us, He opened what to our human reason and scientific inquiry had been a closed book. “Then He said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” And what must be fulfilled? “Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” The whole Bible is about Jesus, and it is all about Jesus for you and me! God was not willing to leave us in our spiritual blindness and death; in fact His love made it necessary that God do something about our situation. And so, from the third chapter of Genesis through the books of Moses, into the prophets, and finally among the beauty of the Psalms, the story of salvation was told. Jesus was proclaimed as the one who would come and deliver us from our blindness. A Savior was promised for you and me, one who would come to deliver us from the domain of death, but this would not be easy. For the Scriptures proclaimed that “the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead.” For us, for love of us, Jesus Christ would fulfill the Father’s will, He would take on the necessity declared by Scripture, and He would go to the cross bearing your sin and my sin. He would go there and offer Himself as the price, the great I AM in place of His sinful people. There the debt would be paid, there Christ drank the cup of God’s wrath. But that was not the end. Light broke on Easter dawn to reveal an empty tomb, for Christ had arisen, just as the Scriptures said, and just as He promised. There He triumphed in victory over our enemies, there peace was declared between God and man. That is what Jesus taught His disciples in our text, there He replaced the doubts of their sinful human reason with a new understanding, an understanding shaped by faith.

The disciples are then sent out to illuminate other hearts, to bring this message of all Scripture that Jesus died and rose again to all people, to apply that message directly to you and me. Jesus says, “You are witnesses of these things.” They saw the risen Lord with their own eyes, they touched His wounds, and now they bring this confession to you and me, the bold confession that Peter declared to the crowd in our First lesson: “You killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.” It is their task, along with the Church in all ages, to fulfill the divine necessity “that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” But they could not do this on their own. “And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” It is the Holy Spirit, the promise of the Father, that opens hearts to believe in Christ, He works through the words of the Apostles and the Scriptures they have delivered to us. The Holy Spirit opens our eyes and ears to see and hear Christ, to believe in Him and grasp onto Him as our very own Savior and Redeemer.

With the eyes of faith, we see Jesus as clearly as the disciples ever did- we see Him as the one who delivered us from death, the one who forgave our sins by taking them to the cross, and we see Him as the One proclaimed on every page of the Scriptures. That is where we encounter Him, through the gift of His Word. But He is not simply a spirit to us, He has arisen bodily, physical, whole and complete. He says to us in His Supper: “Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Our human reason is a good gift of God, and now that Christ has given His understanding and opened the Scriptures to us we use it to explore them and defend the faith. Our reason is now in service to the Gospel, in service to the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen, and we use it to engage our world in its doubt and lies. But eyes can only be opened by the Holy Spirit, only He can reveal what our minds cannot comprehend. And so we place our trust in the words that Scripture proclaims to us- Christ became man for us, Christ died for us, and Christ lives for us. Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Second Sunday of Easter (Series B: John 20:19-31)

“Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this second Sunday of Easter is from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the twentieth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John. Dear friends in Christ, denials of the resurrection are almost as old as the resurrection itself. Matthew tells us of the first attempt to cover up what happened on Easter morning. “[The chief priests] gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, ‘Tell the people, “His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.”’ Since then, many other theories have been advanced, including the idea that Jesus never really died, but only fainted on the cross, or that there was the clever use of a body double, or the thought that the disciples simply made the whole thing up (and were willing to die for something they knew wasn’t true). All of these theories, and countless others, are poor and feeble attempts by our world to come to grips with the fact that someone who was dead, killed in the most gruesome way, was now alive, they are attempts to give a rational explanation for an empty tomb, for the testimony of Mary Magdalene and the disciples.

But doubting the resurrection is not the exclusive property of the world. Jesus’ own followers fell into doubt and denial. Last week we heard the beautiful and touching story of the resurrection according to Saint John, we traveled with our author and Peter to the empty tomb, we stood with Mary as she wept. Then we felt her joy as Jesus came to her side- alive, never to die again! She is sent to tell the disciples what she had seen and heard, and what is their response? “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews…” What? The doors were locked? The disciples had heard the great proclamation of Mary; John and Peter had seen the empty tomb, and still they cower behind locked doors?

This doubt was even worse with Thomas. Jesus appeared to the disciples that first night, he gave them the proof they needed for their feeble faith. But what about Thomas? “Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’” This proclamation was not enough for Thomas. He wanted an experience, he wanted to see with his physical eyes rather than with the eyes of faith. “But he said to them, ‘Unless I see in His hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into His side, I will not believe.’” The Word of the apostles was not enough, he wanted an experience. That is how doubt assails us- it convinces us that what we have is not enough, that we need more. The promises of God in Holy Scripture are not enough, I need to feel Him in my heart, in my own life for me to truly believe. I need some great spiritual experience, some wonderful act of God in my life before I will consider myself truly a Christian. Satan does not want us satisfied with the Word of God, with the witness of Christ’s apostles. Satan wants us hungering and thirsting for more, for some fleeting feeling or experience that will somehow confirm our faith. He wants us searching in vain for confirmation, because when our faith is based only on our own personal experience, it is on shaky ground. Then doubt can come in and make a home in our heart. I haven’t experienced a resurrection, so why should I believe some fishermen? I don’t always feel Jesus with me, so He probably isn’t.

But Jesus Christ, our crucified and risen Lord, comes in to shatter all doubt. “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’” He speaks the words that cast doubt aside, the words of peace, of comfort, of love. They do not have to fear, for He is arisen! And then He shows them the proofs of His resurrection. “When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.” To Thomas, whose doubt was so profound, his thirst for an experience so great, that he was willing to wallow in total unbelief, Jesus also came. “Then He said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.’”

In that moment, ‘doubting Thomas’ was transformed into a bold confessor of Christ’s resurrection. “Thomas answered Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’” Only the Son of God, true God Himself, could rise from the dead, victorious over all that held Him captive. But not only is Jesus true God, the victor over death, but He is Thomas’ Lord and his God. Faith has grasped onto Jesus and has made Him his very own. But as great as Thomas’ transformation is, Jesus is concerned for all others, He is concerned for you and me. “Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Jesus is concerned that all people, both that small group that saw and touched His resurrected body and the many who did not, would all say to Him, “My Lord and my God!”

And so the disciples are sent out to confess. “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” They are transformed from disciples, ‘learners,’ into apostles, ‘sent ones.’ Thomas would travel around the world preaching the message of the Resurrection, perhaps even as far as India, and he would give his life for his bold confession that Jesus is “My Lord and my God.” All of the disciples were witnesses of the Resurrection, and it was now their task to bring that message of victory over sin and death to all people. Saint John took this task seriously enough that he sat down and committed to paper the words and deeds of Jesus: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His Name.”

And so their message has echoed throughout the centuries, passed down from generation to generation until it has reached us. But this proclamation is not simply a history lesson, simply an amazing event that happened a long time ago- their proclamation does not only describe events, it also declares the benefits of the Resurrection to you and me. When Jesus entered through locked doors on the first and eighth days, what were His first words? “Peace be with you.” Jesus had not used those words before this very moment- “Peace be with you” is His Resurrection greeting. And it is this peace that the apostles proclaim to you and me. Jesus could not speak of peace until that most holy of weeks, because man and God were not at peace. We were estranged from Him, in sinful rebellion against our creator. But Jesus Christ had come to bring peace, to bridge the chasm between God and man, to restore the broken relationship severed in the garden. And He could only do this by offering Himself as the price. Peace could only come by submitting to the violence of Pilate’s soldiers, to the cruelty of the cross. And so Jesus, in the immensity of His love for you and me, did just that. He allowed Himself to be arrested, to be beaten and scourged, to be held up in a mock trial, and finally to be nailed to a cross. That was the price of peace, and it was a price He was fully willing to pay. On Good Friday we turned to the cross and heard that it was all for us, for you and me, for love of us. And that is also why He rose again. With His victory over death on Easter Sunday, peace between God and man was fully achieved because all that stood between us has been removed by the triumph of Christ. He comes forth from the grave proclaiming to you and me that we will live forever in peace with God. That is the promise of the resurrection, that is the proclamation that the apostles bring to you this day and every day.

This peace is then delivered to us through the forgiveness of sins. The apostles were not just sent out to proclaim peace to us, but to actually give us peace through the forgiveness of all our sins. “And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.’” The apostles and those who follow them are sent out to forgive the sins of all who believe their words; all who believe in the Resurrection, you and me in whom the Holy Spirit has worked faith. Those who refuse to believe in the resurrection are left clinging to their sin, they have turned away the forgiveness freely given by Jesus. They have chosen to stand naked before the judgment seat of God with their sin. But we who believe in the redemption and victory of Christ by the gift of faith, we will stand before God clothed with the blood of Jesus and His righteousness, we will stand at peace with God forgiven of all our sin. And we will stand before God in His glory, His peace forever.

That is where we place our confidence when doubts circle around us- in the Word of God and His proclamation through the apostles. There we hear that we are at peace with God, there we hear that our sins are forgiven, and when we hear those words we can have the confidence that we truly are forgiven. Our own feelings, our own experiences can leave us at the worst moments, and so we must have an anchor, something to cling to, something that truly and faithfully tells us where we stand with God. That was why the apostles were sent- to confess to you that you have been reconciled with God, that Christ’s resurrection victory is yours, that your sins are forgiven for the sake of Christ. Doubts will still come, but we set against them the sure and certain Word of God. May our risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ keep us strong in the true faith through all doubts that assail us, bringing us to that ultimate peace forever in His kingdom, Amen. Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, alleluia!

Palm Sunday (Zechariah 9:9-12)

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is He, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this Palm Sunday is from the Old Testament lesson read a few moments ago from the ninth chapter of the prophet Zechariah. Dear friends in Christ, the people had heard that Jesus was coming. Of all the miracles that this man had performed, none had been more amazing than the raising of Lazarus. A man who had been dead for days now stood among them alive! And He was alive because of Jesus! “The crowd that had been with Him when He called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to bear witness. The reason why the crowd went to meet Him was that they heard He had done this sign.” Their response was to greet Jesus with as much fanfare as they could muster. “So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, crying out, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!” At this moment, none noticed that Jesus came not on a chariot at the head of soldiers, but instead on a donkey followed by the twelve out of work Galileans. All they saw was the glory, the triumph, of Palm Sunday.

The entry of Jesus of Nazareth into Jerusalem was a far cry from another entry that occurred centuries earlier. Joseph the son of Israel entered Egypt as a slave, as one beaten and abandoned by his brothers to die, then sold to the highest bidder. He carried that memory of betrayal and deception into Egypt. He had come to visit his brothers, and what was their greeting? “They took him and cast him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it.” But that was not the only pit that Joseph would find himself in. He served his Egyptian masters faithfully, only to be falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife. And what did Potiphar do? “Joseph’s master took him and put him into the prison.” The Hebrew word here for ‘prison’ is the same term used for ‘pit.’ Joseph entered Egypt as a slave, tossed from one pit of bondage to another.

The prophet Zechariah in our Old Testament lesson uses the language of Joseph’s story to describe situation of fallen humanity. We too are prisoners, prisoners in a ‘waterless pit,’ a prison from which we cannot set ourselves free. And what is that prison? It is the prison of death. If you think about it, you know that he speaks the truth. Death is inescapable, it is unavoidable, it has us in its shackles and it does not intend to let go. The penalty of being a child of Adam and Eve is death, and not just an earthly death, but eternal death. This seems unfair, this seems unjust, but so was Joseph’s imprisonment. We cannot advocate for ourselves, we cannot hatch an escape plan, we are more prisoners to death than Joseph was to the Egyptians. We cannot escape it. Why is this? What would make us prisoners to this impersonal force, this abstract concept that is too terrifyingly real, prisoners of death? In Psalm 107 we find the answer: “Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in affliction and in irons, for they had rebelled against the words of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High.” Because of Adam and Eve’s fall into sin, we are corrupted with sin, we are born in rebellion against God. We have no peace with God because our every thought and action is opposed to Him. But we should not simply blame our first parents- we have all done plenty to add to our bondage. Lent is a season of repentance and self-examination, and I know that when I do that the results are painfully clear. I deserve the prison of death, there is no way around it. And so what can we do? We have little recourse but to cry out to God for help, for deliverance, for salvation. Once again, Psalm 107 teaches us this: “Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst their bonds apart.” There is the promise throughout the Old Testament that God will act to deliver those who are in prison- you, me, and all humanity. And if Zechariah has identified our condition as prisoners in the pit of death, he also has pinpointed God’s deliverance.

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, you king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is He, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” There is a tension on Palm Sunday. Jesus enters in triumph, but as Zechariah teaches us, He also enters in humility. There was no army accompanying Him, no heavenly choir, no majestic war steed. Instead He rode a donkey and the voices of children and those beaten down by sin that greeted Him. Jesus entered Jerusalem more like Joseph entered Egypt than a king coming into his glory. But this is nothing out of the ordinary for Jesus. That same tension has been following Him throughout His life. Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, true God Himself, the Second person of the Trinity, became man and was born in the lowliest of circumstances. From the moment of His birth He humbled Himself, even as the angels sang. Saint Paul teaches us in our Epistle lesson: “[Jesus] made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jesus made Himself nothing! Zechariah prophesied that the Messiah would come in humility, and in Christ his words are fulfilled. The seeming triumph of Palm Sunday is only a precursor to that great act of humiliation yet to come. We hear again in our Epistle lesson: “And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

For Jesus Christ had come to answer our cries for deliverance, He came to rescue us from the pit of death, to rescue us from the inescapable penalty of temporal and eternal death. And He would do this by His blood, as Zechariah teaches: “As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.” We who could not set ourselves free were released from our bondage by the blood of Jesus. He humbled Himself to the point of death on the cross, and He did this to deliver us! That is what we look toward on this most holy of weeks- we are looking toward the moment of the cross, for there Jesus, the one who entered Jerusalem in seeming triumph, would hear those cheers turn to jeers and the palms turn into scourges. There at the cross He would suffer for us and in our place, placing Himself in the pit of eternal death for us. He allowed Himself to be bound so that He might set us free. The Jewish authorities, Pilate, and the Roman soldiers all had a part to play, but the only reason they could even touch Jesus was that He had humbled Himself to death for you and me. His love for us is so great that He was willing to lay all that was rightfully His aside and instead take on the form of a servant. “As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.” And we truly are set free by the blood of His New Covenant with us, as we hear in the gradual for Holy Week: “Therefore He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised inheritance.”

Through His holy, precious blood and His innocent suffering and death, Jesus has not only released us from our prison of death, He has established peace between God and man. God speaks through Zechariah: “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and He shall speak peace to the nations.” The rift between God and man is now bridged by Christ’s suffering and death- He can proclaim ‘peace’ to us all, because that is the result of His work. His message is peace, peace to all people, because as Zechariah tells us “His rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.” Jesus Christ, the humble yet triumphant king, now proclaims His universal rule, entering into human hearts through the Word and Holy Baptism to set people free, just as He came to you when you were in bondage and rescued you. His salvation is for everyone, just as it is for you and me.

We are then set free to become prisoners of another sort. Jesus calls out to us through Zechariah, “Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double.” We were prisoners to death, but through Christ we are set free to become prisoners of hope. We now are in bondage to the hope of eternal life that fills us. We have been taken captive by the promise, we are in chains to the forgiveness of sins. What a wonderful message! We belong to God, we are attached to His promise even more strongly than we were attached to death! We are set free to live in the ‘stronghold’- the stronghold that is Jesus Himself, as He is our rock, our redeemer, our protection in every step that we take in this dark world. We seek our refuge in Him, for He has come among us. “Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is He!” His Word, the Baptism in which He claimed us as His own, and His physical, tangible coming to us in the Lord’s Supper- those form the stronghold to which we cling. They set us free to look toward ultimate peace, the peace between God and man that He won for us, and the peace which we will ultimately experience in eternal life.

As I said earlier, there is a tension in this day. We see the triumphal entry of Christ, with the crowds crying ‘Hosanna’ and we are tempted to see only glory. There is glory to come, but first must come suffering, first must come humility even to the point of death. Only then, only by defeating our enemies and paying our price on the cross, can the glory come. On this day we look toward the week ahead, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, but we also steal a glance toward Easter. For it is on that day that the tension breaks, and the glory shines forth, as Christ rises triumphant over death, our prison warden, the one who held us captive. We steal a glance toward Easter while saying with the words of the Introit: “Lift up your heads, O gates! And lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, He is the king of glory!” Amen.