Confident.Faith

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Andrew, Apostle. Brother of Simon Peter, St. Andrew was born in the village of Bethsaida. Originally a follower of St. John the Baptist, Andrew was called and became the first disciple of Christ. Church tradition holds that Andrew was martyred on an X-shaped cross. It is St. Andrew’s Day that determines the beginning of the Western Church Year, as the First Sunday in Advent is always the Sunday nearest to St. Andrew’s Day.

Today we commemorate Noah. Noah, son of Lamech, was instructed by God to build an ark. Faithful and obedient to God, Noah constructed the Ark that would carry him and his wife and his sons and their wives — the only eight people to survive the Flood. After the floodwaters subsided, Noah built an altar and gave thanks to God for His mercy in preserving the human race through Noah and his family. In promising never again to destroy all life from the Earth, God made the rainbow a sign of His covenant with man and all life. Whenever we see a rainbow, we should think of God’s great mercy and His steadfast love. We commemorate Noah for his faith and for his obedience to the word of God — for believing that God will do what He says He will do.

You may be operating under the belief that our reading from James does not apply to you. ‘I am not a teacher.’ you may say — ‘at least not a teacher in the Church’ you may think. And that may be true, in a strictly limited sense, but the proper understanding of Scriptural warnings and duties is seldom the strictly limited one. Are you a husband? You are a teacher with regard to your wife. Are you a parent? You are a teacher with regard to your children. The central issue for the teacher is the duty to speak the truth, and that is certainly not limited to religious matters.

All truth is one. To teach falsely with regard to any truth is to become a false teacher and invite the stricter judgement. Certainly, it is a more egregious violation to stand up in the Church and lie about God or His Word, but do you for a second believe that God will ignore it when you lie about Him elsewhere? The God Who watches as a false teacher preaches works righteousness is the same God Who sees you put pronouns in your bio on social media. Or did you think that God would simply ignore Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok?

And do not for a second believe that you will escape scrutiny by declining to take up the task of teacher. If you are a husband or a father — and you had best be the former if you are the latter — then I direct you to the undertitles in the Small Catechism: ‘As the head of the household should teach.’ Just as abortion does not preclude a woman from becoming a mother, but merely makes her the mother of a murdered child — of a child she murdered — so failing to properly teach your wife and children does not prevent you from becoming a teacher, but merely makes you a failed one. And mothers? You are also teachers of your children — God will require their souls from you no less than He will require yours from your husband.

And so what does it mean to be a teacher? It is nothing more than to have a duty to instruct someone in the truth. This duty may be — to some degree — assumed, but is more often simply acquired. If God has given you the gift of intelligence, then know for a certainty that He will require from you that you put that gift to proper use.

Of all the gifts God bestows, intelligence may be the most dangerous — although it could be debated how precisely the curve interacts with the danger. God does not bestow gifts randomly or without purpose. If God has blessed you with an agile mind, a keen intellect, or a sharp wit, then He has done so for a reason — and it is incumbent on you to make good use of your gift. Failing to use your gifts is just as much sin as is misusing them: From him to whom much has been given will much be required.

You may be thinking ‘thank God I barely passed by classes’ or ‘good thing I got all Cs’, but, leaving aside the matter of the correlation between grades and intelligence, you should not be so quick to presume you have not fallen afoul of this duty simply because you are comfortably average, or even if you are significantly below average. To attempt to exercise a gift you have not been given is just as much a sin as failing to use a gift you do possess. If you are not a prophet, then prophesying is sin; if you are not called o teach, then teaching is a sin. And do not neglect the fact that a call to teach one person is not equivalent to a call to teach another. Wives, you are to teach your children; you are not to usurp your husband’s headship and attempt to teach him, nor are you to teach in the Church.

Do you enjoy arguing on the Internet? You may be teaching — best make sure you are teaching the truth. Or do you think that you will evade God’s rules on a technicality? The Jews hang special ‘cords’ — called an "eruv" — to — per their rules, not God’s — delineate certain public spaces as private in an attempt to circumvent their fundamentally disordered understanding of what it means to keep the Sabbath. ("What does this mean? We should fear and love God that we may not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred, and gladly hear and learn it.") A sizable chunk of New York City is actually encompassed by an eruv. A reminder: God will not be mocked.

And so what are the respective duties — teachers to students and students to teachers? The duty of teachers is simple — if by no means easy: teach the truth; do not mislead your students. Yes, it is a greater sin to lie directly about God, but lying about His Creation is still egregious sin. Do you hold that there are more than two genders or that they are not biologically determined? You are a false teacher. Do you adhere to Neo-Darwinian Evolution? You are a false teacher. Do you deny the reality of the nations? You are a false teacher. To deny any truth is to deny Truth. God’s Creation is a reflection and a product of His Nature; to deny the nature of Creation is to deny the Nature of God — is to lie about God. Teachers, you must speak the truth, no mater the consequences. Praevaleat veritas ruat caelum.

The duty of students is to be teachable; in the words of our Isaiah reading, the student must be neither rebellious nor inclined to retreat to his former (incorrect) ways. But this is not a hapless or a mindless credulity — use what gifts and resources God has given you. Hold your teachers to the Word of God. Ultimately, it is the Scriptures that are your one infallible teacher and you must hold all other teachers to the standard of Scripture. This is not ‘me and my Bible under a tree’ — we are not Schwärmer; we stand in a long line of faithful teachers God has raised up to instruct and to protect His Church. We hold to the Confessions because they are faithful to Scripture, because they guide us along the strait and narrow. If you believe a teacher is in error, demonstrate the error from Scripture or the Confessions — if necessary or helpful, enlist the aid of other teachers. The wise teacher will thank you for the correction; the false teacher will reveal himself.

God has provided us with a wealth of resources to guide us through this life, and we must make use of them — instruct your children from the Catechisms, read from the Scriptures with your spouse, attend Bible studies, listen to (good) podcasts. There is no excuse for ignorance. Never before in history have we had such a wealth of resources. Yes, there are dangers — false teachers who would lead astray — but God has not abandoned us and the Spirit will lead us into all truth using the Word and faithful teachers.

Above all, hold true to the core of our faith: Christ crucified for sinners. Do not fall for the siren song of Gospel reductionism — do not deny the Law or the nature of reality — but boldly profess that all truth is one. The same God Who shed His holy, precious blood for you on the Cross is the God by, for, and through Whom all things were created. Do not deny Him by denying His Creation or His Nature. God will not be mocked.

Amen.

For God shows no προσωποληψία — a word that appears only four times in Scripture: in the verse in Romans just quoted, in our reading from James, in Ephesians 6:9, and in Colossians 3:25. A curious word in Greek — if we take the ‘literal’ meaning, then it would be something like ‘face taking’, which sounds quite odd until we actually think about it. To commit the transgression of προσωποληψία is to regard that which is not relevant, or, as our study Bible puts it: ‘to judge unfairly on the basis of worldly criteria’. In our reading from James, this partiality is demonstrated by way of an example — the preferential treatment of the wealthy.

But it is always morally wrongful to show preferential treatment to the wealthy? Would not such a blanket condemnation condemn such things as VIP tickets, private jets, luxury vehicles, expensive restaurants, and a whole host of other such things? If the prohibition is not properly understood, yes. But it is not a blanket condemnation, for we must look at the context: The condemned partiality is being shown in the Church with regard to irrelevant, worldly criteria. The wealth or poverty of an individual should not decide where he may or may not sit in the Church, and the poor should not be made to feel unwelcome.

And yet the pastor stands before the congregation where others are not permitted to stand, and speaks words others are not permitted to speak. Ah, but that is not according to irrelevant, worldly criteria — the pastor is called and ordained, and so stands before the congregation properly and not due to any partiality. Similarly, we may provide preferential parking, seating, et cetera, to the old or the infirm. The issue is the appropriateness of the criteria we are employing as warrant for our actions. And so, in the words of Leviticus, we rise before grey hairs and honor our elders, but we do not permit the large donor to have his own parking space or a reserved pew, at least not because of his wealth.

As you have undoubtedly noticed, this is a matter primarily of the right-hand Kingdom in our reading from James, but the rule applies in the left-hand kingdom as well. We are prohibited from perverting justice — we may favor neither the rich nor the poor. All truth is one, and to subvert justice is to pervert truth. The propriety of any of the aforementioned forms of special treatment afforded the wealthy is a separate matter — the central issue is justice (when dealing with the left-hand kingdom). But let us return to the right-hand Kingdom.

In our Gospel reading — and do carefully note that — Christ calls a woman a ‘dog’. Or does He? The Greek word for ‘dog’ is κυων, but Christ calls her κυναριον, not god, but the diminutive ‘little dog’ or ‘puppy’ — the term you would use of a household pet. Perhaps His disciples missed His point, but the woman did not, and she answered Him in kind, saying that even the family dog feeds on the scraps. But what point was Christ making? He was testing her faith and instructing His disciples. There is nothing special about Jewish blood — the blood descendants of Abraham are not saved by their blood. There is only one Blood that saves, and it was spilled on Calvary, and we receive it in the Sacrament.

Christ was not insulting the woman — He was teaching. He commends her for her faith while simultaneously making a polemical point against Jewish conceptions of how one is saved. Again: This is the Gospel reading.

When Christ came, He healed the blind and the lame as our reading from Isaiah prophesied and the mute and the deaf as the second half of our Gospel reading related. And yet the Jews saw but did not see, heard but did not hear. Trusting in their lineage, many of them rejected the clear teaching of Scripture that we are saved by faith alone. And yet Judaizers persist to this day. Some take the form of ‘Messianic’ Jews, who insist on keeping the ceremonial law — a righteousness of works — by which none is saved — instead of faith. Others take the form of Dispensationalists and ‘Christian’ Zionists, who insist that the Jews are special in some way — a significantly more egregious partiality than that shown to the rich man in our reading from James.

You are not saved by your blood — whether it is German or French or Dutch or Jewish or anything else; you are saved by His blood, by the holy, precious blood that Jesus Christ shed to cover the sins of the world. If you would be saved by your blood, then you will die in your sins. Solo Christo — by Christ alone — are we justified, washed in the blood of the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world.

It is God Who sets the prisoners free, opens blind eyes and deaf ears, heals the lame and the sick, and makes us white as snow. Do not be deceived by false teachers who would preach another gospel and another righteousness — whether of the blood of men, the Law, or anything else. Outside Christ, there is no salvation. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus — by grace through faith we are made members of the Body of Christ, His Church. With God, there is no partiality. Amen.

It is always darkest before the dawn, and things in our society certainly seem quite dark right now. We live in an apostate nation in an apostate time, and matters are certainly not — presently — trending upward. We undoubtedly commiserate with the psalmist in today’s reading:

»O LORD God of hosts,

We are flooded with images and stories of suffering, depredation, and outrageous sin on a nearly constant basis. The misery rectangle in almost everyone’s pocket — or maybe even in your hand — hardly makes matters better. Our culture is full to overflowing with sins — open and notorious — that would make Sodom and Gomorrah blush. At the Judgement, the antediluvians will surely ask God why He spared us for so long. Assuredly, all that stands between our civilization and a watery grave is the rainbow.

The state of the world may bring us to cry to God like Isaiah, to implore Him to “rend the heavens and come down”, to touch the mountains and make them smoke, to make “the [them] … quake at His presence[.]” We groan with the Creation, longing for the renewal of all things; we look for the awesome deeds of the Lord. And yet we must not allow our sinful flesh to use the wickedness of our country, our neighbors, and the times to excuse, to diminish, or to conceal our own wickedness. As the reading from Isaiah teaches of man in his natural, fallen state: “There is no one who calls upon [the name of the Lord].”

As we confess, we are sinful and unclean; we sin in thought, word, and deed; and we justly deserve both present and eternal punishment. We are just as deserving of punishment — both temporally in this life and eternally in the next — as the rest of our fallen race. There are no righteous men. It is only God’s mercy, patience, and forbearance that keep this world from being swept away in an instant. God has promised never again to flood the entire world, but He has also sworn that this world will end by fire.

We may be tempted, given the state of the world, that these are the End Times, but we must remember that only God knows the day and the hour. And yet the wages of sin is death, and so we, as mortal men, are never more than a few moments away from death — and it is appointed for man but once to die and then the Judgement. For us mortals, then, all times are end times.

So what are we, as Christians, to do in times such as these? Two things:

First, we are to do nothing. No one calls upon the name of the Lord because all are dead in sin and trespass, and the dead do not act. And yet we, Christians, are no longer dead. In the opening of First Corinthians, in his greetings, which comes just before our reading for today, Paul describes himself as “called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus”, and, lest there be any confusion, shortly afterward (and in our reading for today) Paul calls the Christians of Corinth, to whom he is writing, “called to be saints”.

There is only one kind of Christian — the called, the Elect. If you believe today, it is not because of anything you did, for no good thing dwells in man’s fallen, sinful flesh; rather, faith is the free gift of God, bestowed via the Word and the Sacraments. You were chosen in Christ before the foundations of the Earth were laid. The faith brought forth in your heart and the regeneration of your soul are no less miraculous than the creation of the Universe. God spoke and there was light; through HIs words He brought for creation. God spoke and you were brought from death in sin and trespass to new life in the Spirit; where you were first given faith through hearing the Word proclaimed or through the water and the Word in Holy Baptism, it was the power of God that brought forth the miracle of faith in your heart.

And in what does this faith repose trust? In what do we believe? We believe in Christ crucified for sinners. By His holy, precious blood, we are cleansed of all sin and unrighteousness. Some will ask: How do we know that we are among the Elect? Do not listen to those who tell you to look within yourself for the answer, for that is not where Scripture directs us. Scripture directs us to look outside ourselves, for God has ordained Means by which we receive Grace. We look to the Word and the Supper where the Spirit is active to strengthen faith, and we look to our Baptism. Baptizatus sum — I am baptized. In the words of our hymn: ‘Child of God, I gladly say it: I am baptized into Christ.‘ Our certainty rests entirely with Christ, not with us. In the words of our Epistle reading: “our Lord Jesus Christ … will sustain [us] to the end[.]”

As Christ’s work was necessary and is sufficient and complete, we need do nothing. No works of our own ever could or ever would save us. And yet we are saved by works — Christ’s perfect work and His perfect sacrifice.

Second, we are to joyfully do good works, not because they are necessary or merit justification or salvation, but because we have been regenerated and now, through the power of the Spirit, have the ability to participate in good works, to cooperate in sanctification. But what are these good works?

By good works, we do not mean the sort of human traditions that are lauded by many. You need not go searching for good works, for God, in the words of Ephesians, has ‘prepared such works beforehand’ “that we should walk in them”.

We look to the Ten Commandments and to our vocations and we find more opportunity for good works than we could pursue in a thousand years.

To keep a home is a good work. To raise godly children is a good work. To care for God’s Creation —of which we are stewards — is a good work. To charge fair prices is a good work. In short, to live our lives where we are — where God has placed us — and to care for those whom God has entrusted to our care is the very heart of doing good works. To paraphrase Luther: ‘God does not need our good works, but our neighbor surely does.’

We know, of course, that good works do not merit justification, do not merit forgiveness of sins, do not merit eternal life, but that is not why we do them. We do good works because we are — as regenerated believers — able to do them. This is something the unregenerate cannot do. When we were without the Spirit, we were dead in sin and trespass and all our works were filthy rages — there is nothing good in fallen, unregenerate man. But we are no longer dead and we no longer serve sin as our masters with works leading to death; we have died to sin and to the flesh and we now live to Christ. In Baptism, we were joined in His death and brought back into new life. We, who once were dead, now live.

This is not to say that we will, as Christians, now live sinless lives. Our flesh still clings to us and we will not be free of sin until we shed this mortal body, and put on a restored, imperishable, perfect body. But we need fear neither our infirmity nor death. Christ will sustain us to the end; He will complete the work He began when first we were gifted faith. When He chose you, He knew all your sins — and not just the ones you have already committed. Flee temptation and resist sin, but know that when you fall — and you will fall — there is forgiveness. There is forgiveness because He paid the price, not some of the price, not part of the price, not even most of the price, but all of the price.

And that is the Good News: Forgiveness is the free gift of God, and it comes with eternal life.

Amen.

We are all born deaf and blind. Hearing, we do not hear; and seeing, we do not see. We know God’s Law, for it is written on our hearts — our consciences accuse us when we stray. We are all without excuse. We have become futile in our thinking, for we sin in thought; we have become futile in our speaking, for we sin in word; and we have become futile in our doing, for we sin in deed.

All our suffering, every affliction, and all the evil and imperfection in this world are due to sin. No, you did not break your leg because you failed to tithe — probably. That is not how sin and consequences work. Many, however, operate under that false assumption — that individual afflictions can be traced to individual sins — but hear the words of Christ when He rejects His disciples’ presumption that the man born blind (or his parents) sinned and thereby brought about his condition. Every evil and every imperfection are traceable to sin because we live in a fallen world.

When our first parents — Adam and Eve — sinned in the Garden, they ushered death into the world, and with death came decay and degeneration. The very good creation was subjected to futility, and so some men are born blind, some are born missing limbs, and some are stillborn. Great and terrible is the suffering in this world, because great is the power of sin. And lest we think too highly of ourselves, we sin each and every day. Not only original sin condemns us, but each and every one of our innumerable actual sins. We are true children of Father Adam.

Naturally, we are sons and daughters of perdition, every bit as separated from God as the dragon in Revelation or as the snake in the Garden. Spiritually, we are conceived, born, and live in darkness, and we spread it everywhere we go. We do not love our neighbors as ourselves, and we certainly do not love God with our whole heart, mind, body, and strength. We justly deserve this present and then eternal punishment.

One must wonder what Paul who spoke of certain sins done in secret as being too shameful even to mention would think of all that is not only done in the open but celebrated in our culture. The night is wretched, dark and deep, and evil seems to never sleep. And yet we know that a still more glorious dawn awaits.

‘For at one time we were darkness, but now we are light in the Lord.’ As Christ is the light of the world, so we have become light through our union with Him. But let us return to the man born blind, whose world was one of darkness. With very few exceptions, blind men in the ancient world had to support themselves via begging. It was an uncertain and unpleasant existence.

Now see Christ stooping down to create mud with His saliva and His hands. Our text comes from John, who also wrote Revelation, but let us go to the other end of the Bible for a moment — to Genesis. Unlike all else in Creation, which God merely spoke into existence, God formed man from the dust; He, like a potter, took earth and formed it into a man — Adam, father of our race. Then God breathed the breath of life into that lump of clay and it became a living being. The mouth that breathed that breath of life in Genesis is the very mouth that spits in the dust to make mud here; and the very hands that formed Adam from the dust in Genesis here form mud to restore sight to a son of Adam.

The true Good News is Christ’s victory over sin and death and our adoption as sons and daughters of the Kingdom, but He also gave us glimpses of the physical restoration that will attend the life to come. Never before had a man born blind had his sight restored, and yet Jesus does so. The man’s blindness was a consequence of sin’s corruption of Creation. The wages of sin is death, and physical imperfection and corruption attend death. Christ’s healing of the man born blind was a little of the Kingdom breaking into the present world — a hint of what is to come.

It is easy to miss the true nature of this miracle (although its uniqueness indicates the true wonder of it). The human brain is plastic, which is to say some regions can be retasked under certain circumstances — say, if you were born blind. Not only did Christ heal whatever physical malformation made the man blind (whether of the eye, the optic nerve, or something else), but He also created the wiring in the man’s brain that is necessary for sight. This is an even greater miracle than the healing of the paralyzed.

Now, we still live in a sinful and fallen world, and so we will not always receive the healing we desire. Injury, sickness, and death are still very much part of this world we inhabit. It is a matter of ‘already’ and ‘not yet’. On the one hand, the Kingdom is already here — you were raised in Baptism to new spiritual life, the first resurrection — but, on the other hand, we are waiting for the fullness of the Kingdom that is not yet here — sin and death are conquered, but will not fully pass away until the Second Coming. As an heir to the Kingdom, you will never truly die — never see the second death, but, as a fallen human being, you will still taste death, but only of your now-imperfect body that will be raised perfect and imperishable.

Just as Christ healed the blind man and then sought Him, so will He one day call you forth from your grave. Death could not hold Him Who had no sin, and death will not hold you, as you have been washed in the blood of the Lamb and made whiter than snow. At the right time, God sent Christ into the world to die for sinners, and nothing could delay or thwart His rescue.

You and I were captives, sold under sin. There was nothing we could have done to free ourselves; we could never have paid the price. But Christ paid our debt on the cross. No work of our own would have ever been sufficient, but that is the Good News: We are freely justified for His sake, due His merit. His righteousness is imputed to us. Not only have our sins been washed away, but our Father in Heaven has promised not even to remember them. Many of the pages in Heaven’s record of your life are blank, because your sins were washed away by the blood of the Lamb. You are Christ’s and He is yours, and nothing will snatch you from His hand. Your name is written in the Book of Life.

So, rejoice with David, for the Lord is your refuge, your mighty fortress, and the righteous will surround you. Yes, there will be trials, pain, and suffering in this life, but the victory has already been won. Death cannot hold you, for death has been robbed of its sting. Christ has bound death and the devil, and now we plunder his kingdom. In Word and Sacrament, Christ comes to us, and we, as children of the light, walk in the light and share with others what was freely and abundantly given us. And just as with our salvation, we need not fear when we share the Good News, for it is God Who will do the work. So let us work while it is still day, buy joyously in the security of a victory already won and a Savior Who never fails, a Lord Who guides, and a God Who loves us.

Amen.