Sermon for Epiphany 4C, January 31, 2016

Text: Luke 4:31-44

            Beloved in Christ, when God’s Word is preached, it changes things. We see this quite clearly in today’s Gospel. When our Lord preached, it opened the way for demons to be expelled from people and for the sick to be healed. Even today, wherever Jesus Christ is proclaimed as our divine Savior, the devil is put on the run and healing comes to people burdened with disease and illness. That is because Christ comes to restore both soul and body to wholeness.

            Now I and my fellow pastors do not have exactly the same authority that Christ does. Christ is the Son of God. In His very nature He has power over the entire universe. Just as the Father and the Holy Spirit have absolute divine power, so does He. Just as they exude life and bring life wherever there is death, so does He. Christ doesn’t have to go up the chain of command to see if possibly it would be okay to vanquish Satan or bring the fullness of life into a particular situation. He can act on His own initiative. But that is not true of me, my fellow pastors, and Christians in general. To be sure, Christ entrusted pastors with the task of teaching His Word. He gave them authority “to forgive the sins of those who repent and to withhold forgiveness from those who refuse to repent.” In fact, he calls all Christians to proclaim the good news of salvation to all who do not know it and to encourage those who do. But our authority comes from Him, not from ourselves. It is not my holiness or my sacrifice or my power that will rout the devil or heal the sick. Whatever my prayers or your prayers can accomplish comes from Christ, not us. That is why ever since Christ ascended into heaven, Christians have prayed, read the Scriptures, and explained them to people who were troubled by the devil and his temptations or who were battling some kind of disease. We do so, confident that God hears us, but also knowing that healing is not always quick or automatic.

Jesus Heals a Deaf Man Possessed by a Demon,
Originally placed in the City Hall of Ulm

            But let us consider the two forms of healing—in soul and in body—that our Lord came to bring. Let us begin with the healing that takes place in the soul. The man with an unclean demon called out, “Ha! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” That is how Satan and every demonic being talks to the Son of God. They recognize Him for who He is: “the Holy One of God.” But they also want to have nothing to do with Him. They want Him to stay out of their little world, for they know that He will turn it inside out, if given a chance.

            But it is not just demons that talk this way. Everybody is born with an attitude that would like to cry out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” Even believers in Christ struggle with a part of themselves that would still try to keep Christ out of the picture. We may welcome Christ’s presence in some corners of our life, but there are other areas where we say that He has nothing to do with us. We may welcome Him on Sunday mornings when dressed in our best and surrounded by upstanding people whose approval we want. But on Monday through Saturday we may say, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” When He wants to speak to us about the sort of ethics we should have at our workplace, we want to say, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” When He says that there is a right way and a wrong way to treat other people in your life, we want to say, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” When He wants to talk about such matters as our egos, our selfishness, our lust, our pride, our anger, and the like, we want to say, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

            But, beloved in Christ, do not talk that way. Submit yourself humbly to the LORD God. When you resist His so-called meddling, you are resisting the Physician who alone can heal you. You are delighting the devil and his wicked angels, who seek only to enslave and destroy you. You are not helping yourself or bringing yourself any greater happiness. You will in the end bring yourself only misery and despair.

            But what would happen if we brought Christ, the Holy One of God, to our Mondays through Saturdays as well as to our Sundays? We would see that God’s love, forgiveness, and grace extend to those days as well. Christ cleaned the temple on a Monday, taught on a Tuesday, was plotted against on a Wednesday, washed feet on a Thursday, was crucified on a Friday, and lay in the tomb on a Saturday. He did all those things so that He could redeem you from your sins, no matter what day they occur on. He died on the cross, all but naked. Do you think that He will forgive you only on Sundays when you are dressed in your finery? No, He loves you on weekdays when you are dressed in a grease-spotted shirt and muddy jeans.

            God is the one who created work. Don’t you think that He has some wisdom to offer about what is right and wrong in how we work? Don’t you think that His love could bring healing to what troubles you most on the job? God created other people and loves them as much as He loves you. Don’t you think that He wants them to be loved by you, even as He wants you to be loved them? Don’t you think that He wants both you and them to experience His love through the way you treat each other? And when He talks about your ego, selfishness, lust, pride, anger, and the like, He does so precisely because these are ways in which you continue to hurt yourself. It hurts to touch those areas, much like it is painful for a doctor to touch an open sore. But it has to be done. The infection has to be dealt with. The more we avoid it, the more the sore festers and the more damage is done. It is painful to have that sore opened, but it is only so that the salve can be poured in. Christ confronts us with our sins in these areas, so that He can proclaim forgiveness for them. When we take that forgiveness to heart, these matters that had long been plaguing us begin to heal. We understand at a deeper level that we are a new creation in Christ. Now the infection of sin will linger and we won’t get rid of it altogether. But we will see that Christ is making a difference as He brings healing to our souls.

            He also brings healing to our bodies, as today’s Gospel reminds us. Now how can I say this, when I know that every founding member of this congregation, including the saintliest, are all dead? How can I say this, when each and every one of us will succumb to disease or injury or old age and die? How can I say this when I know that many in our church suffer from chronic medical conditions or are homebound?

            The key to understanding this is that Christ’s holy life, death, and resurrection has secured perfect healing in body and soul for all who believe, but we are only given a taste of that now. We have been given complete forgiveness and victory over sin, and we will experience that fully in the resurrection. But now we still struggle with sin, and it is only the forgiveness of sins that enables us to keep moving forward. In the same way, Christ has won for us perfect healing in our body, and we will experience that fully in the resurrection. But for now we still struggle with disease and injury. It is only God’s love and grace and forgiveness that enable us to keep moving forward, despite our physical struggles.

            But consider how He continues to heal. We have all had dozens of colds, scrapes and bruises, lumps and bumps. Any one of those things could have killed us, if God had not given us a healthy body able to mend itself. The common cold or some other simple disease could kill us if we did not have a healthy immune system. Likewise, the smallest of wounds could become infected and lead to loss of limb or life. We may take all these things for granted, but we shouldn’t. The fact that we recover from illness, that medicines and vaccines work, that doctors can diagnose things—all of these things are blessings from God.

            But also consider how God comes to us in the midst of our illness and supports us and comforts us. The medical condition may remain, but we know that we have not been abandoned. We recognize that God loves us and is listening to us as we pray. We know that other Christians are praying for us, and their prayers encourage us, too. The burden becomes easier to bear.

            And so, beloved in Christ, may you experience the healing Christ comes to bring through His Word. Let Him be the Good Physician for both your soul and body, and look forward to His return when you will be completely whole in body and soul. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Advent 3, December 13, 2015

Text: Luke 7:18-28

            Beloved in Christ, two weeks ago I mentioned that Christ not only came in the flesh two thousand years and will return visibly sometime in the future, but He also comes to us today, as His Word is read and preached. Thus, the most important thing in the Christian church is hearing the Scriptures read and explained. That is why our liturgy is steeped in the Scriptures; it is one passage from the Bible after another. That is why we sing hymns that are rich in the language and message of the Bible. It isn’t enough that a hymn mentions an idea or two in the Scriptures, but that it expresses biblical content as fully as possible. That is why we make sure that the sermons are based on the Bible and convey its full riches. This is how Christ comes to us and dwells among us today. And we want to make sure that nothing interferes with His coming.

            But preaching isn’t easy—for the one preaching or the people hearing. And we are reminded of that fact in today’s Gospel. John the Baptist had discovered by that point that preaching wasn’t as easy as he had thought. In fact, it looked as if all that time he had spent preaching had been for naught. And so our Lord had to encourage Him. But at the same time He had to have a little talk with the people who had heard John preach. They had found it difficult to understand what John was trying to do. And so Jesus had to explain to them what his preaching had been all about. Preaching is tough, for all parties concerned. But let us listen carefully to what our Lord has to say to preachers and to the people preached to.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger,
  St. John the Baptist Preaching.
As in many of Brueghel's paintings, the main action
(John's preaching) takes up only a small portion of
the canvas. Notice how many of the larger figures in
the foreground are talking among themselves,
some even with their backs toward John.

            From John the Baptist we learn, first of all, that preaching is tough on preachers and those who long to see good preaching. The real problem is that it seems that preaching doesn’t succeed. Last week I mentioned the real topic of all good preaching: repentance. Repentance is more than feeling sorry for our sins, although it includes that. It is rethinking everything that we have been taught by our sinful flesh and our selfish world. It means, of course, to stop looking for excuses for sin or for ways to justify what is wrong and find fault with what is good. But it also means to start putting our trust in God, recognizing Him as our creator, who still takes an active role in preserving this world. It means calling upon God in every trouble and thanking Him for His ever constant help. It means relying upon Christ for our salvation instead of our own righteousness. It means welcoming the work of the Holy Spirit, as He guides us out of unbelief, enlightens us with the truth of His word, calls us to faith in Christ, and helps us to grow in godliness.

            If preaching succeeds, then you would expect people to come out of wickedness and unbelief and instead embrace God’s forgiveness and the life of trust in God and holiness that follows. But we see people like John pour out his entire career into preaching, only to see that little has changed. The Herods of this world seem to be still in control. Sin has been rebuked, but no one has repented. The cry to receive the forgiveness of sins has been mocked or ignored. Maybe there was a brief moment, a flicker of hope. But soon the cold, dank walls of the dungeon seem to have shut in the gospel.

            Meanwhile, preaching is equally tough on the hearers. “Who is this guy?” the crowd asked, when they had heard John. “Why is he out here, standing in the wilderness and flapping his jaw?” Today some people don’t even know why they go to hear a sermon. As far as they are concerned, they might as well look at “a reed shaking in the wind.” Neither John nor a reed have any meaning for them. Other people come to hear preaching because they think that they will be entertained. They went out to see John because he was known for wearing unusual clothing, a shirt made out of camel’s hair and a belt of raw leather. But, of course, more unusual—and more admirable—clothing could be found in a royal court than in the wilderness.

            Still other people go to have a spiritual experience, but on their terms. There were spiritual seekers back in John’s day, and Judaism had a full range of different forms of spirituality that were popular. So it wasn’t unusual for people to go off to the desert and try to “find themselves.” Well, our Lord granted that John was a spiritual man, a prophet of God, but there was something deeper going on. He was the one who, more than any other prophet before him, pointed to Christ as the Savior of the world.

            So listening to the preaching of God’s Word is tough because it isn’t all about being entertained or crafting a spirituality that suits our individual tastes. Instead, it is all about getting us to see Christ—to see our sin that made Him have to come and to see the mercy of God that impelled Him to come willingly. But that is also what makes faithfully hearing the Word of God and the preaching of it so rewarding. There are plenty of places to be entertained. It would take you a few years to visit all the theaters, cinemas, music venues, museums, gin joints, and the like in this city, even if you visited one every day. It would probably take you over a year just to see all the shows that are offered in one day on cable TV. And then there’s all the music on Pandora and Spotify, and all the movies and TV shows to watch on Netflix and Hulu. Entertainment is not in short supply. Something of eternal value is. And that is why hearing God’s Word being preached is so valuable.

            It also satisfies us in a way that all our efforts at crafting our own spirituality don’t. Few people realize that creating your own spirituality puts an awful burden upon yourself. The Scriptures reveal a God who establishes right and wrong and has given us the Ten Commandments. They also show where eternal life and fellowship with God are to be found. More than that, they proclaim that these things are gifts from Him. But those who reject that and want to create their own spirituality put a tremendous burden upon themselves. Not only do they have to keep the rules they invent, they have to play god and create the whole system themselves. But a correct faith lets God be God.

            Jesus pointed out how blessed we are when we hear preachers like John the Baptist and take their message to heart. He said, “I tell you, among those born of women none is greater than John. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” John was a great preacher, but he would die before Christ would complete His work. All John could do was to point people to be ready for Christ’s ministry, death, and resurrection. But John wouldn’t see those things. Instead, he would spend the last months of his life in a jail and would eventually be executed. Thus, ordinary people who heard his sermons would see things fulfilled that John could only foretell.

            John would have been okay with that. After all, we pastors want people who hear God’s Word to pay more attention to it than to us. But still our Lord had something to say to preachers like John as well as to their hearers. We have already heard our Lord say that there is something powerful in preaching. Now let us consider what He had to say to John, and by extension to all pastors.

            Our Lord didn’t deny that preaching God’s Word sometimes lands pastors in trouble. It always has. But He allowed John’s disciples to see all that He was doing. People were healed, comforted, and given the good news of the gospel. Maybe that didn’t seem to extend to where John was sitting, but God’s kingdom was active, nonetheless. Some of the people who were coming to Jesus had heard John preach. Maybe John hadn’t convinced people like Herod, but he had still had some kind of effect on many people. A preacher has to know that a lot of the work he does will not be visible to him. People may hear a sermon only once, but it will stick with them. And the pastor will never know. The only hint we get is when someone shows up at our church because another pastor had preached well and made an impression, and so we assume the same is happening with us. But preachers are like John the Baptist or Moses: we lead the people to where they need to go, but we may not see them enter the Promised Land.

            We should also be encouraged to know that God’s kingdom is always growing somewhere in the world. There is no promise that the church in all places at all times will grow and expand. In fact, church history indicates the opposite. But the church always sprouts up where you least expect it. The good news of salvation in Christ Jesus is preached, the Holy Spirit works faith in the hearts of those who heart it, and saints are gathered into the church. If you do not see the church growing powerfully in your corner of the world, know that it is doing so in other parts of the globe. And so we keep on “preaching the Word, in season and out of season,” for we know that God will use that Word in ways that we may not know right now. His Word never returns empty-handed.

            So, yes, preaching is a big bother—both for the person who must do it and those who have to listen to it. But there is eternal life in those words, and so we should look for the blessing found there. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Epiphany 4B, February 1, 2015

Text: Mark 1:21-28

            Beloved in Christ, our Lord’s preaching muzzles the unclean spirits. We see that happening clearly in today’s text, and so I’d like to explore each aspect of that sentence: Our Lord’s preaching muzzles the unclean spirits.

            We begin with our Lord’s preaching. Our whole text today is about our Lord’s preaching. There was nothing like it, before or afterwards. When He taught in the synagogue at Capernaum, people recognized that “He taught them as one who had authority.” Of course, as we will see, part of His authoritative teaching involved His casting out unclean spirits. That is what led the people to say that He was “teaching with authority!” But there was something else remarkable about the way that He taught. He did not teach “as the scribes.” He was rather unique in His preaching, and the people recognized it and called it “a new teaching with authority.”

            That phrase gets at the heart of the matter. It is easy enough to teach something new, but it is difficult to do it with authority. That is true even in today’s society where we have a penchant for the new. Now we may change ideas and even life philosophies as often as we change underwear. This week we love what this one self-help guru is saying; next week we’ll be listening to some doctor with his healthy life hints. But in spite of our fascination with the new—or, more likely, because of it—we really are wary that there could be anything authoritative. If I know that the fad I’m currently enamored with replaced the fad I was into a couple of weeks ago, then how certain can I really be that this is the end-all and be-all of existence? We constantly upgrade and replace technology. We expect our newest gadgets to be obsolete in a few months or a couple of years. So how can there be something authoritative in an ever changing world?

            The problem that faced the people in our Lord’s day was the flipside. They weren’t the sort of people to adopt the newest thing; their motto was to stick with the tried and true. In many ways that philosophy served them well. God Himself had told them through the prophet Malachi, “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.” That is one of the last verses ever written in the Old Testament. God was promising to send someone new, but in the meantime they were to stick close to what God had already given them. Indeed, for most of Israel’s history the problems had arisen when they had tried to innovate by bringing in idols and other spiritual practices that they found in the nations around them.

            Consequently, the rabbis were very careful in those days. They did not want to say anything that had not been said dozens of times by other rabbis. And so when they would preach on a particular passage of the Old Testament, they would say such things as, “I heard Rabbi Levi tell me that he had heard a conversation between Rabbi Simeon and Rabbi Reuben, where they said such-and-such.” These rabbis were not innovating, but neither were they authorities themselves. Instead they cited others who might be.

            What was needed was “a new teaching with authority.” You’ve heard me mention more than once that there are two Greek words for new: one that means “never existed before” and another that means “new and improved.” It is the latter that is used here. Our Lord wasn’t teaching something completely unheard of. He was not contradicting what Moses and the prophets had said, as heretics are accustomed to do. No, He was deepening what has been said, but He was building on them. Think, for example, of how our Lord explained the Ten Commandments. He took such phrases as “You shall not murder” and explained how it forbids anger, name-calling, and the like. Or think of how He insisted that the Old Testament wasn’t just a collection of old stories, but was a book that pointed to Him and His ministry.

            This is what Christ still does today. Yes, He does not walk physically into our churches and ascend into the pulpit. But His teaching is the basis of all faithful Christian preaching. This isn’t like a rabbi quoting another rabbi or scribe, all of whom are speculating on what God might be saying. No, Jesus Christ came as God in human flesh, to reveal to us all that is necessary for us to know for our salvation and to reveal it in the clearest manner possible. Faithful Christian preaching, therefore, is about taking Christ’s words seriously and seeing in them the “new teaching with authority,” the teaching that is as old as creation but is fresh and powerful, for God has revealed it not on a mountain obscured by smoke or in the hazy dream of a mystic, but by taking on our flesh.

            And so Christ came to deal with mankind’s problems in an authoritative way. But now we have to consider another aspect of our text, the unclean spirits. Now that we’ve talked about Christ’s preaching, we have to consider the opposition that Christ faces: the unclean spirits. They go by other names such as “demons” and “evil spirits.” Chief of them is Satan or the devil. But Christ preached because He wanted to smash Satan’s power. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil,” wrote the apostle John. And today’s gospel reminds us of that truth.

            Several decades ago most people—even Christians—would have smirked when they heard such passages of the Bible or read today’s gospel. “Why,” they would say, “we are such civilized people that we don’t believe in all that mumbo-jumbo about a voodoo world!” But, of course, we have gone through such horrible decades of world war and concentration camps and gulags and genocide. And so now it makes a whole lot more sense to talk about supernatural forces of evil that goad on human beings to do an abundance of wickedness. No, we will not say that every person who committed some horrific evil was demon-possessed. But at the very least Satan and his minions are always stirring the pot. And humanity is naturally beholden to them.

            That is why even today where the gospel advances into new lands, demons are cast out and conquered. (If you want to hear more, you can read the book I am Not Afraid about how the Malagasy Lutheran Church has grown mightily in Madagascar precisely by taking seriously the need to defeat demonic forces; a copy is in the narthex.) Satan does not want centuries of idolatry to come to an end and fights overtime wherever God’s kingdom is advancing. And I dare say that as we live in an increasingly post-Christian country, we should recognize more and more the hand of Satan at work—and the need for him to be defeated and driven away. If we are slow to understand Satan’s influence today, we should take to heart what Helmut Thielecke said in the last century: “Evil cannot be seen by the evil just as stupidity cannot be perceived by the stupid.”

            Notice what we find out about the unclean spirit in today’s gospel. First, he is called “an unclean spirit.” He could have been called an “evil spirit” or some other term, but what Mark is emphasizing here is how Satan defiles people, making them unclean before God and others. This unclean spirit had no problem with the man attending the synagogue and hearing an interesting lecture on what rabbis of old had thought about this or that passage. But Jesus cut to the chase and proclaimed that He had come to redeem God’s people. Now all of a sudden the evil spirit had a problem. Unclean spirits have no problem with people being “spiritual,” for they know that they can twist whatever is spiritual out there for their purposes. But they do have a problem with Jesus, for they recognize Him as “the Holy One of God” and therefore the one who has “come to destroy” them.

            So how does Jesus deal with them? He muzzles them. Our translation says that Jesus told them to “be silent,” but “put a muzzle on it” would be more accurate, since the verb literally means “be muzzled.” In colloquial English we might say, “shut up” or “zip it.” It’s not the polite way to tell someone to be quiet. The devil loves to talk and talk and talk. You can answer him point by point, but he’ll come up with a hundred more senseless reasons for his foolish temptations. He’ll say enough of the truth—and certainly the unclean spirit in today’s gospel confessed the truth about Jesus—but he’ll still twist it for his purposes. You don’t outtalk or argue with the devil. You tell him to shut up. And he has to shut up because Jesus Christ died on the cross and smashed the devil’s kingdom by rising from the dead.

            Would that we would take this to heart! Let Jesus say, “Enough! Be silent!” Satan and all the forces of evil would like to talk you into believing that whatever feels good is right and that you need to change God’s law to conform to the times. Let Jesus say, “Shut up and scram!” The forces of darkness would love to terrify you and get you to think that you are haunted by ghosts and other forces you cannot control. Let Jesus say to those forces of darkness, “Zip it! Leave My people alone!” Satan would love to convince you that you are beyond redemption because of your sins. Let Jesus tell him, “Stuff it! Git outa here!” Because Christ has come, the devil and his minions have no right to say anything more against you, a beloved child of God. In short, Christ has come to make the devil literally shut the hell up. I don’t mean that as a vulgarity. No. The devil is spewing forth garbage from the depths of hell out of his mouth. He needs to be quieted. And he can be quieted, for Christ is the one who has conquered him.

            That is why we gather today and every Sunday. We say the words of Jesus, and it is Jesus who smashes the kingdom of the devil and muzzles the unclean spirits. May you live in that victory! In Jesus’ name. Amen.