181014 Sermon on Matthew 22:1-14, October 14, 2018 (Trinity 20) The history of the world is the history of the Gospel.  After the fall into sin God promised salvation by the Messiah who would be born of the woman.  Ever since that time God has continued to preach the Gospel through the testimony of his Christians, and that has always provoked a response.  This is something that we also see from the beginning.  Adam and Eve believed and lived by their faith.  But their first born, Cain, did not believe and this provoked him into murdering his brother Abel.  The very first man born after the fall into sin was a murderer, and the reason why he murdered is because he couldn’t stand to see the image of Christ in his brother.This is a story that continues on from that point to the present day.  It is very important that we learn from the Bible about the reactions the Gospel will produce, because the Bible teaches very differently than what most people believe.  The Bible clearly shows that the Gospel will bring division and trouble as it separates the believers from the unbelievers.  When Jesus sends out the twelve to preach the Gospel to the towns of Judea he says to them, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”  The most intimate ties that we know of by nature are the bonds of family.  But there are bonds that are supernatural and greater than the bonds of family: the bonds of belief and unbelief—the bond to Christ on the one hand and the bond to everything else that is not Christ on the other.The Bible speaks of these two different groups or ways of living as being opposites.  There is the way of life and the way of death.  There is darkness and there is life.  There is righteousness and there is sin.  There is salvation and there is damnation.  In all of these things there is no middle ground.  Something is either one thing or the other.  Either you are dining in the banquet hall or you are in the darkness outside where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.This kind of talk makes people nervous because it raises the stakes of what might otherwise be considered something optional.  Most people think that the Gospel invitation is something a person can either take or leave and it won’t make too much difference either way.  Life will go on, as they say, whether a person becomes a Christian or not.  The importance of Christ’s redemption is never clear to those who remain unbelievers until the end of their lives and the end of the world.  In the meantime they can eat and drink, buy and sell, marry and be given in marriage.But this injustice cannot go on forever.  It must come to a stop either through repentance in this life or eternal confinement in hell in the next.  God does not take delight in the death of the wicked, but desires that all people be saved, and so he sends out his messengers with the Gospel as we heard about in Jesus’s parable today.  In Jesus’s parable the messengers are entrusted with the invitation to the King’s wedding feast for his Son.  The King is God the Father.  The Son is Jesus Christ.  The Holy Spirit is in words of the messengers’ invitation to the wedding feast.  The sacrifice for sin that Jesus has brought about is indicated by the slaughtering of the oxen and fattened calves for the feast of victory.  There is an abundance for the people to enjoy.  And this kind of language is not just parabolical and symbolic.  Christ says in another place that whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life.  Eat and drink while you believe his promise and you will live have exactly what the words say.  Who wouldn’t want good

181007 Sermon on Ephesians 4:17-32, October 7, 2018 (Trinity 19) There are two groups in the world: those who are God’s people and those who are not.  All of history has this theme and the Bible testifies to it.  What is particularly important for understanding the Bible is the way that God chose Abraham and his descendants to be his people, and that he would be their God.  Abraham believed this promise from God and it was credited to him as righteousness.  Abraham’s descendants, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons, believed this promise they too were justified by faith.  And so it went generation after generation.The Bible records the dealings that God had with these people and whether they believed in him or not.  Because of the powerful enemies against faith, namely, the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh, the faith of God’s people is never as stable and strong as we might like it to be, and this is attested to in the Bible.  And so there are some of God’s people who defect from God and his promises.  They are deceived and tempted and misled.  They end up putting their trust in things besides the one true God for the blessing and happiness.  And in God’s wisdom, which is unsearchable, he does not restore them to the true faith.  They are cut off and lost.  They once were believers, but they are no more.  They once were God’s own, distinct from all other people, but that is no more.There are a couple exceptional examples of this fall from faith that are recorded for us in the Bible.  The first is the fall of the northern kingdom called Israel.  They continually put God to the test with their disobedience and idolatry.  God was long suffering towards them and sent them many prophets to turn them to the right way, but they would not be turned.  They loved their dishonest, proud, and lustful practices too much.  They did not repent.  Finally God quit sending prophets to them and sent the Assyrian army instead.  Then the people of the northern kingdom were scattered hither and yon and they simply melted into the mentality and beliefs of the people around them.The other great example of God cutting of his people is what happened with the Jews in their rejection of Christ.  From the very beginning God promised to send his beloved Son as the Messiah who would redeem his creatures who had become sinners.  In the fullness of time he sent this Son, born of the woman, the Virgin Mary, who redeemed all the people of the world.  But with the exception of a very few the Jews did not recognize the true Christ and believe in him.  In fact, it was the Jews—descendants of Abraham and God’s own beloved people whom he cherished above all other people—who rejected Christ and would not rest until he was put to death on the cross.  Even though they tortured and murdered his Son, God was still long-suffering towards them.  He sent Christ’s disciples to testify to them.  He announced the forgiveness of sins, purchased with Jesus’s blood, that was for them and for their children.  Again, a few were converted by this promise of God’s favor, but most were not.  Instead they mocked and gossiped and lied about those who believed in Christ.  They drove them out of their jobs and out of their towns and tried to extinguish all knowledge of Christ and his redemption.  They killed ordinary Christians, but they especially targeted those gifts of God whom God had given who were able to testify publicly.  They killed the public preachers and the apostles.There are no worse sins than these sins—when God’s Word is derailed and silenced so that people’s faith is overturned—and so God’s wrath was provoked.  He quit sending his messengers to the Jews and sent the Roman army instead.  The people who would receive God’s promises now would be those who previously were not his people: the Gentiles

180923 Sermon on Luke 14:1-11, September 23, 2018 (Trinity 17) What a person wants is usually pretty important for what happens in a person’s life.  Some people want to have a lot of money.  That can determine how they live their life.  They choose to do certain things that will be profitable or prepare them for becoming more profitable.  They do these things instead of doing other things—like watching TV.  Some people want to live for pleasure.  Gratifying desires, whatever they might be, is the top priority.  Living for pleasure is often hard on the bank account and can be unhealthy depending on what those pleasures are, but living the way we want to live is a powerful force and most will not be deterred from what they want. What should we want to live for as Christians?  The answer is wisdom.  But the word “wisdom” can conjure up all kinds of pictures in people’s heads.  Some might think of a bookish professor.  Some might think of an esoteric guru sitting on a mountain top.  Most people think that wisdom is something that is inaccessible to them because they are not smart enough to attain it.  But that is not true of the wisdom that the Bible teaches.  Some people whom the world thinks are stupid, are wise according to the what the Bible teaches.  Most people whom the world thinks are wise, are actually foolish as far as God’s Word is concerned.  St. Paul says to the Christians in Corinth: Consider your callings, brothers.  Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no flesh might boast in the presence of God.  And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”That rather lengthy quotation tells it exactly how it is.  The wisdom that we are to attain is not recognized by the world.  The world is looking for power, honor, glory, riches, and whatsoever else might improve a person’s quality of life.  The world has learned this from our first parents who looked with desire upon the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  They thought that this fruit might be useful to them.  They thought it would help them to get ahead in life.  They thought it would make them wise.But what is happening at the exact same time that they are having these contemplations within themselves?  God is receding back into the shadows of their consciousness.  His Word, “In the day that you eat of it you will surely die,” no longer held the sway it once did.  Now it was being judged and evaluated alongside the words of the serpent who said, “You won’t surely die.”  Instead of God calling the shots, Adam and Eve were coming into their own.  They felt as though they were getting wiser by the minute, until the temptation gave birth to sin and they ate.Adam and Eve’s fall into sin did not take away their powers of reasoning.  They were able to form ideas and make plans just as they could before.  Adam and Eve were able to seek out possessions and pleasures just as competently as they could before.  In fact, maybe they were even better at it now.  They were no longer preoccupied with thinking about their Creator.  In fact, they didn’t enjoy thinking about him at all anymore.  Now they were free (but really enslaved) to live for themselves, and more than anything, they determined to love themselves instead of loving God or loving each other.  They became greedy and self-centered, looking out only for their own advant

180916 Sermon on 1 Kings 17:17-24, September 16, 2018 (Trinity 16) Last week I spoke about the opening words of Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”  Most Christians believe that these words could not possibly apply to them, because they are quite convinced that God exists.  But there’s a world of difference between sayingthat God exists and believing that he exists, and then living by that faith.  Far from believing in God, all people by nature believe that they will be blessed and happy because of the things that they do.  This is why greed and scheming and cheating are so common.  It’s assumed that there is no other way to get ahead.  But Jesus tells us that he is the one who gives us our daily bread.  Just as God feeds the birds and clothes the grass, so also he feeds and clothes us.  Fools might believe that this is technically true.  They have the head knowledge that God is the creator and preserver of life.  But they don’t really believe it and therefore live by it.Last week we had a very good example of someone who was not a fool—the widow of Zarephath.  She was in dire straits because the drought and the famine had left her with only a handful of flour and a little bit of oil.  When the prophet Elijah met her, she was gathering sticks to make one final meal with her son, before they would die.  But Elijah told her to make a little bread for himself first, before she fed herself and her son, and the Lord would see to it that she did not run out of food before the drought and famine were lifted.  The widow believed the Lord’s promise.  And so she and Elijah and her household ate for many days and the flour did not run out and the oil jug did not go dry according to the word of the Lord that Elijah had spoken to her.  Because she believed, she was generous even though she had so little.  As I mentioned last week, a lot of people would judge this widow as being foolish.  They might even go so far as to say that she was being immoral.  She was taking the food out of her dying son’s mouth and giving it to someone she didn’t know.  But she was not being foolish.  She believed that God exists and that he does stuff.  The real fool is the one that says in his heart that there is no God, so it’s all up to me to make the kind of life that I want for myself.  Such a one is an idolater who believes that other things besides God are what will provide blessing and happiness.  This widow, in contrast, hangs everything she has upon God even as her life and her son’s life is on the line.  She is wise.And she continues to be wise even though she is struck with calamity and heartache as we heard in our Old Testament reading today.  Our reading today picks up immediately after last week’s reading left off, and we find out that this poor woman’s son became ill and his illness was so severe that he died.  The heartache that this woman had was terrible.  Very few have been afflicted like she was.  But she remains wise, and in the same way too.  She continued to believe that God exists and that he does stuff.  In this case, though, the “stuff” that God has done is rather frightening, and you can hear that fear in the widow’s words.  When her son died she went to Elijah and said, “What have you against me, O man of God?  You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!”  When the widow addresses Elijah, she is seeing him as a representative and an ambassador for God.  That is why she calls him “God’s man”—a more definite and direct way of linking him with God than even by calling him a prophet.  God has come to her in Elijah and the miraculous flour and oil that she has enjoyed is proof of that.  But now this same God has brought about the death of her son.  She acknowledges this and speaks about it

180909 Sermon on 1 Kings 17:8-16 Matthew 6:24-34, September 9, 2018 (Trinity 15) Psalm 14 begins with a line that perhaps you are familiar with: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”  I’ve heard this line quoted by Christians when they are engaging atheists who promote the idea that there are no such things as gods—that everything has come about by chance from eternally existing matter.  According to King David, the composer of this psalm, they are fools because they explicitly say, “God doesn’t exist.  There is no God.”  But what David means with this sentence is by no means exhausted by only applying it to outright atheists.  That is way too restrictive of an application.  The fools that David is speaking about here are not just a few militant atheists.  He is speaking about all people as they exist by nature and according to their old Adam.Perhaps you are thinking, “That doesn’t describe me.  I don’t say that God doesn’t exist.  No such words have ever come out of my mouth.”  And I don’t doubt that.  Probably nothing so wicked has ever been said by you.  But King David does not say, “The fool has said with his mouth, ‘There is no God.’”  Rather he says, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”  David is speaking about an internal reality—in the mind and in the soul.  That is something quite a bit different.  There are a whole lot of evil things that we hide in our mind and soul and we do not broadcast it to the entire world with our mouths.  If people knew everything that went on inside our heads we would all lose our good names and our good reputations.  We would have no friends and our families would be offended by what we have thought about them from time to time.  Really only a very small portion of what goes on in our heads makes it to our mouths.  The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”But again, you are probably still not convinced that you are actually guilty of this kind of thing.  I’ll try to show you that you are indeed a fool by asking you just one question: “Why do you sin?”  Why have you and why do you do what you know is wrong?  If you were smart you would know that there is a God who sees all and knows all and hates every trespass and every disobedience and therefore punishes those who commit sin.  In the end, nobody gets away with anything.  Even if we are not punished eternally in hell for our sins because of the intercession of our Savior Jesus, at the very least we will still endure bitter shame and heartache for all that we have done.  Sin never helps anybody.  It might seem as though it gives you some advantage or some fast fleeting pleasure, but we cannot escape the punishment that is due.  God threatens to punish all who break his commandments, therefore we should fear his wrath and not do anything against them.  Smart people would avoid sin at all costs.  Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.  I will be helped and blessed and happy even though I know this is wrong.  Everything will turn out fine in the end.”  We are no different than our first parents, Adam and Eve, who saw that the fruit looked delicious and that it held out promise for making them wise.  So they disregarded God in their hearts, took the fruit, and ate it.  You have all had similar experiences where your desire overruled your awareness of God and his will.  It’s almost like Satan blinds us and makes us deaf so that we become utter fools who believe that God does not exist.So you should all be able to see that you are fools who have said in your hearts, “There is no God.”  The only other alternative is that you have had a perfect awareness of God and his commandments and have never done anything against them.  And I know that isn’t true of any of you.  But today, because of the readings we have, I’d

180826 Sermon on Luke 10:23-24, August 26, 2018 (Trinity 13) At the beginning of our Gospel reading today Jesus turns to his disciples and says to them, “Blessed are the eyes which see what you see, for I tell you that many prophets and kings have desired to see the things that you see and did not see them, and to hear the things which you hear and have not heard them.”  To understand what Jesus is talking about, we have to ask, “What is it that they have seen?”This takes us to what comes immediately before these words in Luke chapter 10.  What has happened is that Jesus has sent out the seventy or the seventy two disciples, to go into different towns and villages.  Jesus gives them their instructions: they are to announce to those whom they meet in these places that the kingdom of God has drawn near to them.  Saying that the kingdom of God has drawn near means that the spiritual reign and rule of God has been made present.  Through the words these disciples speak, God is ruling in his kingdom and doing the work that he wishes to do.  As Jesus says, sometimes they will be received and welcomed, sometimes they will not.  Those who receive them will have peace with God.  Those who do not receive them will have judgment from God.  In fact, he says that it will be more tolerable on the Day of Judgment for Sodom, than it will be for these places that do not receive these disciples who announce God’s kingdom.  That’s because when they reject these disciples who speak according to Jesus’s instructions they are not just rejecting them as individuals.  They are rejecting Jesus who sent them, and the Father who has sent Jesus.  This is where Jesus says those words that I often mention to you: “Whoever hears you, hears me.”  When these disciples speak, it is not just they who are speaking, but Jesus is speaking through them.When these seventy or seventy two come back to Jesus from their trips they are filled with joy.  They tell him, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name.”  This shows us what we know to be true from other places as well—that the name of Jesus is powerful.  Remember that and call upon him in every time of trouble.  When Jesus sees and hears the joy of his disciples, he joins in with them in their happiness.  He tells them that he saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning.  It is God’s will that the devil should be defeated and that we should be set free from our slavery to him.  This happens by the preaching of God’s Word—by the powerful name of Jesus.This brings us to the words at the beginning of our Gospel reading where Jesus tells them that they are blessed for seeing and hearing the things that they have seen and heard.  They have been given something that many others have not been privileged to take in.  They know Jesus and the authority that he has been given over all things.  Even the prince of this world must not only retreat, but is dashed to the ground like a bolt of lightning.Here we have an episode of world history, and a demonstration of what world history is ultimately all about.  In the beginning God created Adam and Eve as special creatures—made in his own image.  They were created to have perfect fellowship with God.  Adam and Eve destroyed this fellowship through sin.  And so it was necessary for God to restore them if they were not to be eternally lost.  How did he do this?  He made a promise to them.  He promised the redemption that Jesus Christ eventually was to accomplish on the cross for the sins of the whole world.  God’s kingdom drew near when he spoke to Adam and Eve.  By God’s grace they believed his promise.  Therefore they were justified by the faith that they had in the Christ who was promised to them.This is how we must understand the rest of the Bible and all of world history.  The key question at all times

180819 Sermon on Mark 7:31-37, August 19, 2018 (Trinity 12)

180812 Sermon on Genesis 4:1-15 Ephesians 2:1-10 Luke 18:9-14 August 12, 2018 (Trinity 11)

Sermon on Jeremiah 8:4-12, Romans 9:30-10:4, Luke 19:41-48 (Trinity 10) August 5, 2018

180729 Sermon on Luke 16:1-13 (Trinity 9), July 29, 2018