Sermons

What is preaching? St. Paul writes in Romans: “Whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved. How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Romans 10:14-15)

Therefore our Lutheran Confessions state: “It is also taught among us that one holy Christian church will be and remain forever. This is the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel.” (Augsburg Confession VII:1-3)

There are 256 posts filed in Sermons (this is page 64 of 86).

Easter Vigil 2011 – Genesis 1-2

23. April 2011
Easter Vigil
Genesis 1-2

Tonight the Holy Three Days, the Triduum, ends. We began at in the upper room, proceeded to the Garden and to the judgment seat, escalated to the place of the skull, and was finally laid in the tomb. A bittersweet meal, proceeded to exhaustion, then to condemnation, the dying breath, and the final resting place.

But that’s not the end of the three days. The sign of Jonah doesn’t end with the sealed tomb. Just as the fish could not contain God’s man, so also the grave could not contain the Son of God. He burst the chains of death’s prison, destroying its captive hold forever.

Our Christian celebration of Christ’s bloody triumph is not just three days. It is also seven. Just seven days ago, we rejoiced with our Lord as the multitude declared Jesus the Son of David, King, and Messiah. Hosanna to the highest.

For six days our Lord labored for your salvation. On Sunday, he entered triumphant. Monday, he cleansed the temple. Tuesday, debated in the temple, leading to the condemning charge of blasphemy.  Wednesday, he prepared his disciples through discourse. Thursday, he held his final Passover and his first Supper. Friday, he dies. And now, Saturday, he rests in the tomb from his labor.

Sound familiar? It should. Its not the first time our Lord has labored for a week. The last time began in darkness with nothing. Then, on the first day of the week, there was light and it was good. The next day, the heavens and the earth were separated. The next day, the earth and sea were separated with the blessing of all plants and trees. The next day, the earth was blessed with stars and planets. On the fifth day, the living creatures of the sea and air were made. On the sixth day, the living creatures were made upon the earth and it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them…

And God saw everything that he made, and behold, it was very good… Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

Then, through the sin of Adam, death entered the world. Mankind tasted of the prohibited fruit, violating God’s command. He ignored God and received the due penalty for his violation. He was cast from the garden. His life became a living hell, struggling against thorns and thistles, against shame and guilt. His wife labors in pain for the good fruit of marriage.

Suffering, pain, and anguish were bad enough. But even worse, their grievous error opened the gates of Hades. Satan and his legions would torment them night and day. The tempter’s charm would drag them further into lawlessness and the despair it brings.

And worst of all, through Adam death entered into the world. Through this one man, all mankind dies. We are the inheritors of the curse. We are cursed to disobedience, to lawlessness, to shame, to death.

Even in the midst of this death, our Lord has not forgotten us. What he made, and we corrupted, he wants to redeem. So great is his love that he promises to restore the world to its former goodness. What took six days to make, and one shameful sin to destroy, our Lord Jesus Christ the crucified restored in six days. This day, we receive the blessings of this week’s recreation.

Tonight is the seventh day. Just as our God rested on the seventh day, the founder of the world, rests from this week. The labor is long but the work is complete. When he declared from the cross tetelestai, which means “it is finished,” he is declaring that the work is done. Our Lord looks down from the cross at those three days, at that week, at the three years of ministry, at the thirty years of life—all lived for your salvation—and he sees that is very good.

So it is each week, each Sabbath, that we rest from our labors, considering all God’s work for us. We consider his baptism, his fasting, his temptation, his teaching, his preaching, his agony, suffering, and bloody sweat. We consider his condemnation and crucifixion. We consider his three day rest in the tomb.

When the dawn rises upon us in the morning, Holy Week will be but a vivid memory and the new week of the new creation will begin. It is our triumph over sin, our victory over death, our everlasting life in paradise. It is our rebirth in Christ in Holy Baptism. It is our conscience renewed in the declaration “you are forgiven!”  It is your body and soul kept in the steadfast faith through Christ’s body and blood.

These precious gifts are ours because we are in Christ and he is in us. Easter is the eighth day, the beginning of our new life with Christ. The work is done, the victory won. Let us enter into the blessed rest that is our Lord.

In Name of the Father, + Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
Grace Lutheran Church
Dyer, Indiana

 

Good Friday Tenebrae 2011 – Psalm 51

22. April 2011
Good Friday Tenebrae
Psalm 51

Why death? Why the death of our Lord? Why death of the only and holy God incarnate? It is total scandal. Total absurdity. Totally unbelievable.

No one wants death, for themselves or for others. No one wants their friend, master or mentor to die. A dead God is a worthless God. Death is the end. Curtain call. The last candle extinguished. The final breath.

The death of Jesus is only scandal if we ignore ourselves. Peer deep within the recesses of your soul and tell me, is there light? Or is all that you see darkness, decay, corruption, and death? The scandal of the cross is not that God died. The scandal is that he died for you.

We are a prideful people, boasting in our goodness. We love how we keep the Law, parading our good lives before our family and friends. We are polite, honorable people. We pay our taxes. We help the little guy. We support our church and those in need.

God doesn’t care. Even the heathen, the pagan do those things. Some of the most noble men are rabid atheists. They hate God and hate his church. And still, they live noble and virtuous lives… on the outside.

God does want you live a moral and upstanding life. That’s a good thing with him, to be sure. But his Word is more concerned about why you look Christian. Is it because you fear, love, and trust in God with your whole heart? Is it because you love your neighbor as much as yourself? Do you honor our Lord’s name because in it you find all your comfort, wisdom, and joy? Do you attend to the Lord’s sabbath rest because in His Word there is life and salvation?

If you’re honest, you’ll confess the answer no. You’ll confess that you haven’t done enough. You haven’t love enough. You haven’t prayed enough. You haven’t attended to the Word enough.

Good enough doesn’t cut it. That’s the way of the Law. The Law that says what we must do, making no exception. Either it is kept or not. Black or white. Do or do not, there is no try. If you have failed at one point, you have failed at the whole. Even a brief slip of the tongue, a forgotten prayer, a brief neglect to love is enough to bring down the severity of judgment on your head.

Be like the Psalmist. Confess that you’re not good enough. You haven’t been as lawful as God demands. You don’t make the cut. You haven’t made the grade. Despair of yourself.

Don’t end there. Don’t ignore the scandal of your flesh. Run to Christ and receive healing in the blood. Boast in the death of Christ. Let that cross have its way with you. The Gospel is the power to save you from yourself. Let the horrible Gospel sight of our Lord dead blot out your iniquities. Let the water that poured from the side of our blessed Lord wash and cleanse you.

Let the Jesus take to his cross your worst fears, your greatest shame, and dirtiest thoughts. Let him suffer for you, that you might be clean. Let him drink from the hyssop laden with the sour wine of vinegar and gall for you and so make you clean. Let the cross be the truth, the wisdom of God. Hear his weak voice of victory, declaring “tetelestai” which means “it is finished.” The spirit is given up for you. Its breath is your breath, the very life of God. His blood is your blood, brothers and sisters in Christ. His flesh is your flesh, you, the body of Christ.

Its only scandal is to those who perish. But in Christ’s death you live. In the death of God’s own son, you are made his own, redeemed children of the heavenly kingdom. Why death? So that you will never die.

In Name of the Father, + Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
Grace Lutheran Church
Dyer, Indiana

 

Good Friday Chief Service 2011

22. April 2011
Good Friday Chief Service

Now we know why they call all this Christ’s Passion. God in the flesh, felt the nails, the thorns, the ripping and tearing and beating, felt the agonies of hell just as keenly as we would. God in the flesh is hanging on a cross. And He’s doing it for one reason: to save lost and condemned creatures from everlasting death.

Christ was that passionate for the lost, that passionate about your salvation. You can hear it in His voice, can’t you, when He says, “It is finished.” Christ’s Passion! He cared that much to be able to say the same to you, to have you with Him for eternity in heaven.

Or did He? Was Christ really so passionate for you? Was Christ’s Passion even really for you? Or was it just for some of the lost? Say what?!!

Many Christians believe that Christ’s Passion wasn’t really for everyone, or at least Christ wasn’t passionate in quite the same way for some as for others. Many of these are even neighbors to us, celebrating Good Friday but arguing that its only good for some. How’s that?

Everyone loves a good story—especially of a poor soul who is lost then found. Consider the widow and her lost coin. Or the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep among the ninety-nine.  Those parables were enacted for real during our Lord’s passion. We certainly have that with the penitent thief on the cross. From the very edge of hell—forever and ever and ever—maybe only minutes away, suddenly our penitent thief has Paradise. Labored, no doubt, as each breath comes with great pain, but sweet, and with quiet conviction. Jesus is passionate to save this man.

But what about those souls who are never found, who remain forever lost? Like the guy on the other cross. Was Christ passionate about saving him? Did Christ’s Passion even count for him?

John Calvin, who lived about the time of Luther, and the Reformed branch of Christianity, from which Presbyterians and many like United Churches of Christ come, would say Christ’s Passion didn’t count for him. The idea is called “limited atonement,” that Christ’s death only atones for, only reconciles to God, those whom God predestines for salvation. Everyone else, everyone who doesn’t come to believe, Calvin said, was predestined for hell. That was that. You didn’t know exactly who that might be, but, of course, then, you couldn’t know for sure for whom Christ did die.

Lutherans certainly reject that idea. St. Paul writes that God “desires all people to be saved” (I Timothy 2:4). Christ’s Passion was for all, even for those lost who are lost forever.

Not that long after Calvin, there was a man named Arminius. Many Baptists and Methodists follow his position. He was horrified with Calvin’s idea that God would predestine some to hell, so he said the reason some are lost forever while others are saved is because there’s something in one person that’s different from another. Maybe one person is willing to let God save her, or maybe one person decides for Christ, while another won’t.

But think about what that would mean. It would mean it wasn’t just Christ’s passion to save the lost that saved them, it was something in them. Apparently Christ wasn’t passionate enough for the lost to do all the saving; He felt He had to leave something up to them. But Paul says again we were all “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). A dead person can’t help save herself.

A similar controversy came up with some Lutherans who took a position somewhat like Arminius,both in Germany after Luther’s death and resurfacing again in America. Those who held the position said that that God chose who would be saved by looking down the line from eternity and seeing who would eventually come to be saved. There’s a Latin phrase for it, intuitu fidei, or “in view of faith.” If God looked into the 21st century and saw you were going to believe in Jesus, OK, chose you for salvation.

Almost sounds like it makes sense but right-teaching Lutherans rejected it. Why? It’s another way of saying something in us has at least a little to do with how we’re saved. Another form, really, of being saved by works. Or to put it yet another way, Christ wasn’t passionate enough to save you to do all the saving.

Consider what that would mean for us. You could say, of course, “I believe, so it’s all fine.” But what about the day when you’re stressed, and you know you’ve really been sinful, and you start to wonder, “Do I still believe?” or “Did I ever really believe?” or “Is my faith what it takes to be real faith?”

If this were your understanding of salvation, you couldn’t say, “I know I’m saved! I was forgiven when I received Christ’s body and blood,” because maybe you’re not one of those for whom that works. Or, “I was saved when I was baptized or when Pastor told me I was forgiven. Maybe I’m not one of those God chose because my faith isn’t real faith.”

Scary stuff! Maybe Christ as He’s hanging on this cross isn’t really so passionate about me. Maybe I’ll actually suffer the kind of hell that he suffered!

But consider what Christ says in the passion according to St. Luke, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” Jesus said that to those who were crucifying Him. Sounds pretty passionate, doesn’t it! Did they all believe? Not now. Did they all come to believe? No indication that they did—maybe some yes, maybe some no. Christ was still passionate for them—all of them—even the ones who would still be lost forever. Not only was Christ’s passion for all the lost, but Christ was passionate for all the lost, all the lost.

That means Christ is passionate enough to do all that’s necessary to save everyone. The penitent thief didn’t have something special in him, even if we’d like to think so. He was really wicked; in fact, you know, earlier this very day on the cross, he was blaspheming Jesus, too. It was Jesus’ passion for him—nothing else—that saved him.

That means He is passionate about me, passionate enough to let me be absolutely sure of my salvation. \tYes, what you see here today, your Lord suffering the torments of hell on the cross, is for you! Yes, Christ’s Passion is sufficient to pay for all of your sins, enough to buy you Paradise! Yes, Jesus is passionate enough for your salvation not only to earn it for you on the cross, but to deliver it to you in His Word, in your baptism, in His true body and blood, in your pastor’s word of absolution. Yes, you here today—all of you—can be certain of your salvation! You were lost, but you are found.

That also means that Christ is passionate for everybody else out there. When Christ’s Passion is laid before us, when we see Christ on the cross today, and we hear this: In His passion for us Christ has given us eternal life, then, dear friends, Christ’s passion for the lost—all the lost—has just found you.

In Name of the Father, + Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
Grace Lutheran Church
Dyer, Indiana

(This sermon is heavily indebted to Dr. Fickenscher. Soli Deo Gloria.)