The Holy Spirit will be your Advocate

Posted on May 18, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Easter 4 – Cantate

James 1:16-21  +  John 16:5-15

On the night before He died, Jesus told His disciples that He would be going away, referring to His ascension. They had spent the last three years or so by His side, being led by Him, being instructed by Him. All they had to do was listen, learn, obey, and follow. But all that would change after Jesus’ ascended into heaven. After that, they would graduate from the seminary, as it were. They would be the ones doing all the teaching and preaching. They would be the ones interpreting Scripture and explaining the will of God, explaining the things Jesus Himself had said—things which they often didn’t understand themselves while He was with them! And they would be doing it, not only among their fellow Israelites in their homeland of Israel, where people at least had a knowledge of the Old Testament and were awaiting the promised Messiah, but also in foreign lands, among the Gentiles, who had a completely different—and wrong!—understanding of who God is, who practiced a false and pagan religion. How on earth could they possibly take over this ministry if Jesus was going away?

I tell you the truth: It is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. Jesus promises His apostles a Helper, the Helper, whom He Himself would send to them after His ascension, a Helper who would take over for Jesus, in a sense, except that, instead of preaching to the world directly, as Jesus had done, the Helper would be working through the preaching and through the ministry of the apostles. The Helper, sent by Jesus, would be the One doing the actual building of the Holy Christian Church.

Let’s talk about the title “Helper,” since this is the first time we’re running into that name in our lectionary this year. It’s a word used only by the Apostle John, in his Gospel and in his first Epistle. In 1 John, he actually uses the word for Jesus, where it’s usually translated, “Advocate”: If anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous One. The imagery of the word is of someone who is called to your side to help you, to speak up for you, like an advocate or an attorney does in the courtroom, who counsels and encourages you, who advocates for you, someone who’s both by your side and on your side.

In heaven, we have an Advocate like that, as John says. Jesus is that Advocate. He died for our sins. And He rose again in order to justify before God all who believe in Him. He is also at the right hand of God, interceding for us before the Father. But here on earth, the One who speaks for us, the One who Advocates for us, the One who is on our side, is the Holy Spirit—the Spirit whom Jesus poured out on His apostles on the day of Pentecost. We’re going to be hearing more about the Spirit over the coming weeks. For now, we focus on the help Jesus promised in today’s Gospel.

He will show the world its fault concerning sin, and concerning righteousness, and concerning judgment. Concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to my Father and you will not see me any longer; concerning judgment, because the prince of this world is judged

He will show the world its fault. Other translations of that word are “convict” or “reprove” or “rebuke.” I like the simplicity of showing someone his fault. The Helper will show the world its fault, will show the world where the world (as in, the unbelieving world into which the apostles were being sent) is wrong, wrong in three specific ways.

He’ll show the world where it’s wrong concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. People are generally wrong about sin. They tend to think of sin as some terrible thing that other people do. They think they can engage in every kind of immorality, nastiness, violence, adultery, selfishness, etc., but it’s what “those other people are doing” that’s truly sinful. They think they get to define what sin is, and they think they can avoid having their sins charged to them if they do enough good things to outweigh the bad things. But the Helper will show the world where it’s wrong concerning sin, how God is the One who defines sin in His Word, how sin infects everything they do, and even who they are by nature. They’ll deny it, but the Spirit will not relent. He’ll show them where they’re wrong, and most of all, because they do not believe in Jesus. He’s the only One who wipes out sin. The one who repents of his sins and believes in Jesus has no sins counted against him, because he’s justified not by his own works but through faith in Christ Jesus. On the other hand, every human being who does not believe in Christ Jesus for the forgiveness of sins is and will be charged by God with sin. And as the Scripture says, the soul that sins shall die.

He’ll show the world where it’s wrong concerning righteousness, because I go to my Father and you will not see me any longer. People are generally wrong about righteousness. Most people tend to think of themselves as righteous people, at least righteous enough. They think that just about any actions they do are justified, because they have good reasons for the things they do, or because their feelings led them to it. How can their feelings be wrong? They think their righteousness before God is something they already have, or is something they can achieve. But the Helper shows them where they’re wrong. Jesus is mankind’s only Righteousness. We have none of our own. And He has gone to the Father; He has ascended into heaven. So man’s only access to righteousness, man’s only access to God is through the ministry that Jesus has left behind here on earth, the ministry of the Spirit, the ministry of the Gospel, where God has decided to bestow righteousness on us through Holy Baptism and through faith in His Son, where God has decided to grant us access to Him through Holy Communion, where the body and blood of His Son are truly present. You want righteousness? You can’t have it apart from Jesus, and that means, you can’t have it outside of His Holy Christian Church, where the ascended Christ has placed the ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Finally, He’ll show the world where it’s wrong concerning judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. People are worried about all sorts of things, but not nearly worried enough about God’s judgment. They think they’ll escape it. Many think it will never even happen. They’ve aligned themselves with this world and live for this world. But what they don’t realize, what the Helper reveals, is that the devil is the prince of this world, and that all who live for this world, will also die with this world, and will be punished eternally, together with the devil himself. The only hope of escaping the judgment that’s coming on the world is through repentance and faith in Christ, now, while there’s still time. People aren’t afraid enough of the day of judgment that’s coming. But the Helper will show them where they’re wrong.

But, as I said, He doesn’t do that directly, He does it through the preaching of the Word of God that the Church began to carry out on the day of Pentecost and has been carrying out ever since. It doesn’t mean that the world will accept the Spirit’s rebuke. For the most part, it won’t. Nevertheless, the rebuke must go out. And the Christian Church must and will continue to teach the truth concerning sin, and righteousness, and judgment, even if the preachers of the truth should be again as few as they were at the beginning, where only eleven men in that upper room with Jesus on Maundy Thursday were charged with bringing this truth to the world. Think about that, how impossible it would have been, except for the help of their Advocate, the Holy Spirit of God.

Jesus speaks in our Gospel of another way the Helper would help His apostles. Not only would He help them to preach to the world. He would also help them to understand the truth that had to be preached. When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. What an important promise that was! As we said, the disciples often didn’t understand the things Jesus taught them. How could they teach others? The Spirit, the Advocate, the Helper would guide them.

Now, this was, first and foremost, a promise made to the eleven apostles. They would form the foundation of the New Testament Church. Their teaching would dictate the doctrine that all Christians are to believe and confess until Jesus returns. So in their preaching and teaching, and, just as importantly, in their writings, they had the promise of divine guidance and inspiration from the Holy Spirit.

That’s why the true Church has always believed in the principle of Sola Scriptura, that Scripture alone—the inspired writings of the Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles—are the only source of Christian teaching and the only standard by which all other teachings must be judged. That’s why we reject any teachings that don’t have the inspired teaching of the apostles as their source.

But, as the apostle Peter promised, all baptized Christians would also receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, not to contradict the apostles, not to add teachings that the apostles never taught, but to grasp the meaning of the truth that the apostles left behind for us, guided as they were by the Holy Spirit.

Of course, as you know, Christians now exist in dozens of “denominations” and have broad disagreements about what that meaning is, when it comes to several articles of doctrine. Those disagreements never come from the Holy Spirit. He is always pointing toward the truth, and pointing, specifically, toward Jesus to glorify Him. No, all those disagreements always come from the outside, always come from the devil, trying to sow discord and false doctrine into the truth of the Holy Spirit, as men either refuse to believe, in context, the words as they are written, or insist on adding content of their own that isn’t derived from Scripture.

How can we deal with such a situation? How can we identify and cling to the truth? Only by relying on the help of our Advocate, the Holy Spirit of God, who has been given to us, too, as Jesus promised. We have diligently studied the words that the Spirit inspired, and also the witness of the Church from the beginning, and, by the Spirit’s help and guidance, we have come to know that which we believe, teach, and confess, and we’ve also identified many of the teachings that do not agree with the Scriptures, and, therefore, cannot come from the Spirit of God.

Still, it’s a daunting task, to confess the truth in a world that promotes so much that is false, to show the world where it’s wrong, when even many “Christian” churches insist that we’re wrong, to be a tiny little church, with a quiet little voice in the world. It feels very lonely at times. That’s why it’s essential that we cling to Jesus’ promise in today’s Gospel. Because He hasn’t left us alone in the world. He has given us an Advocate, to speak up for us, to guide, comfort, and encourage us—an invisible Advocate, yes, whose voice you can’t hear with your ears. But if you believe in the risen Lord Jesus, whom you can’t see, then believe also in the Advocate whom He promised to send. Our work in this world is simply to believe and to confess the truth that has been revealed to us in the Word of God. The Holy Spirt is the One who will work through it, as He sees fit, to glorify God in Christ, and to build His Holy Church. Amen.

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Hope for the sorrowful

Posted on May 14, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Midweek of Easter 3

Lamentations 3:18-26

A little while and you will not see Me. And again a little while and you will see Me…You will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy. We heard on Sunday how Jesus prophesied to His beloved apostles the sorrow they would experience for a little while, followed by joy that would be far greater than the sorrow ever was and that would, at least eventually, be permanent.

Sorrow is nothing new for mankind. Sorrow is nothing new for the Christian. Since the Fall into Sin in the Garden of Eden, sorrow is part of the divinely pronounced curse on mankind. The final and complete remedy for sorrow will come when the risen Lord Jesus comes again. Until then, sorrow will still exist, and we learn from the words of the prophets and apostles, not how to escape it, but how to deal with it, and how to look beyond it.

Sorrow is something that the prophet Jeremiah knew all too well. He lived at one of the worst times a believer could ever live in, during the years leading up to and including the destruction of Jerusalem. He witnessed the nation of Israel, which, at that time, was synonymous with the Church of God on earth, utterly disintegrate from within—spiritually, politically, morally, and socially, and then he watched it fall to foreign invaders. And all the while he found himself in a very small minority of people who were still faithful to the God of Israel, while practically all his neighbors had turned away, and were tired of hearing his preaching. Even as I describe Jeremiah’s situation, it strikes me how similar it sounds to our situation today, as we live in the dying days of a republic, and, really, of the world.

And so we get into Jeremiah’s book of Lamentations, which includes three separate laments. The first two chapters are the lament of Jerusalem for herself, Jerusalem personified as a woman, as a virgin daughter who is being justly punished for the sins of her children. So Jerusalem’s lament isn’t a complaint. It’s simply a recognition of how badly things have gone for her because of her own sins and transgressions. She recounts all the disgrace and shame and ruin that she has suffered from unfaithful people within and from unbelieving Babylonians without. This is what it looks like to receive just punishment for one’s sins: utter devastation, being on the receiving end of mockery, abuse, and ridicule; homes in ruin; people literally starving in the streets; dead bodies everywhere.

But that was Jerusalem’s lament for herself, because her people, including her kings and priests, had abandoned the Lord God and turned to idolatry and “self-help” solutions, away from God and His Word. Jerusalem’s lament applies especially to those Christians who have actually abandoned the faith, who have become Christians in name only, or to those Christians who are suffering because of their own sins.

As for Jeremiah, his personal lament begins in chapter three, where our verses are taken from. Jeremiah had been a faithful prophet. He had not abandoned the ways of the Lord. He had not followed the people into idolatry or apostasy. And yet he, too, was suffering greatly. He, too, had to live through the fall of a nation, even though he wasn’t to blame for it, and in addition to that, he had to suffer shame and persecution for preaching the truth God sent him to preach. So his words apply especially to those Christians who are suffering, not directly because of their own sins, but because of the sins of others.

That doesn’t mean they’re sinless, or that they don’t deserve to suffer. The only sinless One who ever suffered was the Lord Jesus. No one’s heart is pure by nature. All people have earned eternal condemnation. But not all suffering and sorrow are punishment for sins. When we suffer because of the sins of others, we call it “discipline” or “testing.” And when we suffer for Christ’s sake, we call it “the cross.”

So it’s in that context of a believer in God, a child of God, being sorrowful and having to suffer for the sins of others, that our text begins. Jeremiah writes: And I said, “My strength and my hope Have perished from the LORD.” He said that after recounting, in the first 17 verses of chapter 3, the many ways in which the Lord had caused him to suffer. And, yes, even though it was the fault of the impenitent and unbelieving, it was still the Lord who caused Jeremiah to pass through it rather than rescue him from it. At the end of it, Jeremiah felt like he had no strength left, no hope left from the Lord. He was near despair, which is utter hopelessness. That’s how he felt.

But he also knew that what he felt wasn’t quite true (which is often the case!). If it were true, then there would be no point in going on, and certainly no point in praying. But he does go on to pray: Remember my affliction and roaming, the wormwood and the gall (that is, the bitterness I have had to endure). Remember! It’s not as if the Lord forgot anything. He isn’t capable of forgetting. The cry for the Lord to remember something is a cry for sympathy, a cry for compassion. Because, of all the attributes of the Lord, mercy or compassion is the one that is triggered by us, triggered by our wretchedness, or by our need and our inability to help ourselves in our need. Asking God to remember our neediness or our wretchedness is a way of asking Him to have mercy on us.

My soul still remembers and sinks within me. Jeremiah can’t forget the things he has been through. He remembers, and it still pains him, how the pagan Babylonians had ravaged the capital city of God’s kingdom, how his fellow Israelites laughed at him, rejected the word that God gave him to preach, and then persecuted him and threw him in a pit, and eventually dragged him off to Egypt instead of letting him live in peace under the Babylonians. He doesn’t deny the suffering he’s been through. He remembers, and his soul sinks.

But, again, he knows it’s not the whole story. This I recall to my mind, Therefore I have hope. Through the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness. This is the answer to sorrow. This is the remedy and that which restores hope, to recall to our minds the LORD’s mercies, the Lord’s compassions. Plural. Because it’s not just His attribute of being merciful and compassionate, which He is, but it’s all the many evidences of His mercy and compassion throughout history and throughout our lives. Those mercies are inexhaustible. They’re new every morning. Many of them have been recorded in Holy Scripture. Some of them we have witnessed here together at Emmanuel. And some of them you have individually seen in your own life, how the Lord has shown mercy to you, how He has upheld you in hard times and brought you through them in His faithfulness to His baptismal promise to you, to forgive you your sins, to save you, to be your God, and to work all things together for your good.

“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I hope in Him!” My “portion” is hard for us to grasp without understanding what a portion meant to an Old Testament Israelite. An Israelite’s portion was the piece of land in Israel, in the territory of the Promised Land, that each person or each family received as an inheritance. It belonged to no one else, only to that family. It was given to them by God as part of the inheritance He had promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, given through Moses and Joshua, for that family to live there forever. They had a claim to it. It was their most treasured possession. It was their heritage that they received and then passed on to the coming generations. Well, here Jeremiah speaks as the Psalmists often speak. He calls the LORD Yahweh His portion, which is like saying his treasure, the thing he treasures more than anything else in the world. He has the LORD as his own God, the God of his past, present, and future, the God who has promised that the sorrow will soon be replaced with everlasting joy. Therefore I will hope in Him!

Therefore you should hope in Him, too, because, in Holy Baptism, the same LORD gave Himself to you as your portion, as your heritage. You can call Him your own, even as He calls you His own beloved child. And if He is your true treasure, and if no one can take Him away from you, then even if you lose everything else, you still have your true treasure. And so you have reason to hope, and to rejoice.

The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, To the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly For the salvation of the LORD. Yes, a part of hope, by definition, is waiting. Waiting for the Lord to do what He has promised to do. Waiting for the sorrow to be turned into joy. Waiting is hard. Waiting quietly is perhaps even harder. But sometimes there’s nothing you can do about a problem, and waiting is all you can do. Well, it turns out that waiting is all you need to do. Waiting, and seeking the LORD while you wait for His help. Seeking Him in His Word and Sacraments. Seeking Him by seeking to walk according to commandments while you wait for His salvation to be revealed. You may have to wait a while, but remember what Jesus said in Sunday’s Gospel. It will only be “a little while.” And then you will see Him. And your heart will rejoice. Amen.

 

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The pattern of sorrow followed by joy

Posted on May 11, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Easter 3 – Jubilate

1 Peter 2:11-20  +  John 16:16-23

We spent Holy Week listening to the apostle John recount Jesus’ words and deeds during that climactic week of His earthly ministry. Today we begin a series of five Sundays in the Church’s lectionary in which the same apostle walks us through some of Jesus’ final instructions to His apostles in the upper room in Jerusalem, before they set out for the Garden of Gethsemane. Some of the things He said applied to the immediate future, but mostly, He was preparing them for the time after His ascension, for those crucial decades when these men would be laying the foundation of the Christian Church, carrying the Gospel to the world, beginning with Jerusalem. It would be a trying time for them, with plenty of sorrow, so He encouraged them with the words of our Gospel. But He was also leaving behind words for St. John to record for our benefit so that we have the encouragement we need, in our time, to face the sorrowful times ahead, so that we, too, may have a reason to rejoice.

“A little while, and you will not see me. And again, a little while, and you will see me, because I am going to the Father.” They didn’t understand what He was talking about, and they were afraid to ask, so He goes on to explain, although still somewhat mysteriously. Jesus said to them, “You are asking one another about what I said, ‘A little while, and you will not see me. And again, a little while, and you will see me.’ Truly, truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy.

There is a fulfillment of these words in Jesus’ suffering and resurrection. Within a few hours, Jesus would be taken away from them, arrested, tried, tortured, convicted, crucified, and buried. During that time, Jesus’ disciples would be sorrowful. They would be sad, right up until the moment Jesus appeared to them again, in that same upper room, on Easter Sunday evening. Then they rejoiced when they saw the Lord, just as He said they would.

But on that evening, when Jesus talked about going away, He wasn’t mainly talking about going away to death and the grave. He was talking, as He said, about going away to His Father in heaven. He was talking about leaving the earth and ascending into heaven, after which they would never see Him again in this life. In a little while, that is, in 43 short days, they wouldn’t see Him anymore. And during that time, for the rest of their earthly lives, they would know many times of sorrow, as those men, one after the other, were persecuted and put to death for their preaching of Christ, and as they watched their brothers and sisters in Christ be tortured and killed for their faith, too. During that time, the world would rejoice, because the world would think it had gotten rid of Jesus for good, thought it would get away with doing as it pleased with the Christians who still live in the world.

And yet, Jesus says that, in a little while, His disciples would see Him, and that their sorrow would be turned into joy. The Easter fulfillment of that saying, when the sorrow of not seeing Jesus for a little while was replaced with great joy in seeing Him again, set a pattern for the future. It had another fulfillment, when they closed their eyes in the sleep of Christian death, and their souls were taken to Paradise, where they saw Jesus again after the sorrow of this life was done. And it will have another fulfillment, when Jesus returns at the end of the age, when all things reach their goal, and evil is destroyed, and death is swallowed up forever, when God will put an end to all sorrow and wipe away every tear from every believer’s eyes.

That’s three fulfillments of Jesus’ saying: at the time of Easter Sunday (for the original disciples), at the time of their earthly death, and at the end of the age which is still to come. But there is yet a fourth fulfillment of Jesus’ mysterious statement.

After Jesus’ ascension, the disciples didn’t see Him with their eyes, and they experienced sorrow, as we said. But by His Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit whom Jesus would pour out on His Church on the Day of Pentecost, Jesus enabled His apostles, and all of His believers, to “see Him” in another way, to see Him by faith, and to rejoice. By His Spirit, after they had experienced a little while of toil and sorrow—and near despair, as the apostle Paul describes it to the Corinthians—Jesus would fill them again with the assurance that their labor in the Lord was not in vain, that Christ really was reigning on His throne, that God was truly working all things together for their good. After they had experienced a little while of sorrow, Jesus would comfort them again by His Spirit, would testify to their hearts by His Spirit that they were beloved children of God, and so would enable them to rejoice.

We have an example of that in the apostles, after the Day of Pentecost. They were arrested by the Jews and beaten for preaching the Gospel of Christ. But as soon as they were released, it says that the apostles rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name. That’s not a manmade rejoicing. It’s the joy that Jesus gave them by His Spirit, teaching them a brand new way to view suffering—not as something to be feared, not as something to make them despair, but as something that is even cause for rejoicing.

The apostle Peter taught Christians the same lesson in chapter 1 of his first epistle: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

As Christians, you’ve surely experienced this strange mixture of joy and sorrow. At times the sorrow of feeling abandoned by God is stronger, while at other times the joy of knowing for certain in your heart that the Lord Jesus, who died for you, also rose again, and reigns at the right hand of God, and will never leave you or forsake you—that joy is renewed and strengthened. It’s all part of the pattern that Jesus spoke of in today’s Gospel, a pattern of sorrow followed by joy.

But they are not equal. There is not an equal amount of joy for the sorrow you go through. No, Jesus makes it clear that the joy is far greater. It weighs far more than the sorrow does. He compares it to childbirth in our Gospel—and how appropriate for Mother’s Day! There’s plenty of sorrow, plenty of pain, but in the end, the joy of bringing a child into the world is far, far greater than the sorrow ever was, as all moms will attest.

The pain and sorrow are, of course, a result of sin. Your sins, other people’s sins, the sinful condition of a world that is cursed. But this is why Jesus came, came into our sorrow, came to share in our pain, came to bear our sins, so that, by paying for our sins on the cross, and by defeating death in His glorious resurrection, He might break the pattern of sorrow followed by only more sorrow, the pattern of sorrow followed by only death, and create a new pattern. A pattern of sorrow followed by joy—true joy, joy in seeing Him now by faith, joy in the Paradise that believers will enter when we die, and the final, perfect joy of the resurrection at the end of the age.

You don’t need to see Jesus now, with your eyes, in order to experience this joy. The Lord is risen, whether you see Him or not. The Lord is risen, whether you experience the joy of it or not. And His promises remain true, even when you’re going through a time of sorrow. The Lord promises that, soon enough, you will see Him. And your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you. And as Peter also wrote, Though you have not seen Jesus, you love Him. Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, receiving the goal of your faith—the salvation of your souls. May these words, inspired by the Spirit of God, sustain you in all the times of sorrow you must still face in this life, and may they also grant you the sure hope of the joy that will most certainly come. Amen.

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The Shepherd Himself goes looking

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Midweek of Easter 2

Ezekiel 34:11-16  +  John 10:1-10

You may have seen in the news that the papal conclave began today, the secretive process for choosing a new pope. The whole world is watching and waiting to see who the next pope will be, and what stances he’ll take, and whether he’ll rescue or further destroy Western Civilization. It’s somewhat ironic that it’s happening this week, as we hear the Scripture readings about Christ the Good Shepherd. Because, of course, the pope claims to be the Chief Shepherd over all Christians on earth, the head, not only of the Roman Catholic Church, but of the Holy Christian Church—as if the Church could have another head besides Christ, as if there could be another chief shepherd over the whole Church besides Christ. For that claim alone, Christians should recognize the papacy as an abomination. And no matter who sits in the chair that they falsely claim to be the chair of Peter, no matter who is chosen, the office of the pope will bring only destruction to Christ’s sheep within the Roman Church. It will only serve to scatter them and drive them away from their true Shepherd, the Lord Jesus Christ. Because, while there are surely many sheep of the Good Shepherd still within the Roman Catholic Church, the office of the papacy, by its very nature, seeks to lead them, not toward the Lord Jesus and His Word, but away from Him.

It’s uncannily similar to the situation of Old Testament Israel at the time of the prophet Ezekiel, who wrote during the early years of the Babylonian captivity. There was no single shepherd or king or prophet or priest who had tried to lead the people of Israel astray. No, but the kings and priests, as a whole, and many false prophets, had thoroughly abandoned the sheep and had become self-serving instead, using their positions to hold onto their power and their possessions. In the verses before the text you heard this evening, the Lord, through Ezekiel, berated those worthless shepherds of Israel, even as Jeremiah had done not long before, because those shepherds had not been working to preach the Word of God to the sheep, had not been seeking the lost, had not been preaching the Law to the secure sinners, or offering the comfort of the Gospel to the fearful and guilt-ridden sheep. They had not been pointing people ahead to the coming of the Messiah. Their ministry had become a business to them, a political role, an institutional position, not at all unlike the ministries that flood the Christian Church today, both in Rome and outside of Rome. Those worthless shepherds had so decimated the Church of Israel spiritually that God had to come in and decimate them politically, too, sending the Babylonians against them, sending Israel into captivity. The sheep, for their part, weren’t innocent in all of it, but the shepherds bore the greater guilt.

And so, with His flock scattered as far as Babylon, largely because of the unfaithfulness of the shepherds, the Lord announced His solution: ‘For thus says the Lord GOD: “Indeed I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out.

Much like the prophet Isaiah, as we saw during our Wednesday evening services last year, the prophet Ezekiel’s prophecies often have a double or a twofold fulfillment. God Himself would intervene in history, first, to bring His people Israel back from captivity in Babylon, back to the land of Israel. God Himself, through rulers whom He would raise up, like Cyrus and Darius and Nehemiah and Ezra, would resettle His people in their land. That was the first fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy.

But it was a minor fulfillment, a stop-gap fulfillment, because the sheep would just go back to their wandering ways, and the new shepherds who would arise in Israel would, for the most part, be just as bad as the old shepherds, so that, by the time of Jesus, God’s evaluation of Israel was that they were like “sheep without a shepherd.”

And so, about 575 years after Ezekiel prophesied, the Lord fulfilled this prophecy in the most direct and personal way possible. He didn’t go looking for His sheep through anyone else. He went looking Himself, in person. He sent His only-begotten Son, God, the Son of God, to Israel.

I’m going to reread the rest of the verses you heard from Ezekiel 34. And, while some things in the text have a first fulfillment in the return from Babylon, we’re going to focus on the second, bigger fulfillment at the time of Christ—and afterward! Listen again to the rest of the text:

As a shepherd seeks out his flock on the day he is among his scattered sheep, so will I seek out My sheep and deliver them from all the places where they were scattered on a cloudy and dark day. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land; I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, in the valleys and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them in good pasture, and their fold shall be on the high mountains of Israel. There they shall lie down in a good fold and feed in rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I will feed My flock, and I will make them lie down,” says the Lord GOD. “I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick;

Jesus did all of that during the course of His earthly ministry. He came, as He said, to seek and to save what was lost. He came calling the lost sheep to repentance and offering them a Father’s welcome back into the kingdom of God, to those who were willing to be carried back on Jesus’ shoulders. He fed them with the truth, with the Gospel, with God’s promise of forgiveness through Christ. He treated the broken and the sick, both physically and spiritually, and assured all who came to Him that He would give them eternal life and an eternal inheritance in the kingdom of God.

But notice what Ezekiel said the Lord would also do: but I will destroy the fat and the strong, and feed them in judgment. That’s what Jesus did with the scribes and Pharisees. He didn’t physically destroy them. He destroyed them with the sword of His mouth, with His word, as He exposed their hypocrisy, charged them with sin in the sight of God, and assured them that, in the sight of God, they stood already judged.

Ezekiel doesn’t touch on the other part of Christ’s shepherding in this text, how the Shepherd would lay down His life for the sheep, to make atonement for their sins. That was the awful price of their readmittance into God’s favor. But it’s also the very thing the Father sent the Good Shepherd to do, and He did it gladly and willingly for all who were and who would become His precious sheep.

Of course, in this Easter season, we focus less on the suffering and death of Christ and more on His mighty resurrection from the dead. In this Easter season, we focus on how the risen Lord Jesus continues to shepherd His flock through the ministry of the Word. Because it’s still Him doing it, even though He uses flawed and weak men as His mouthpieces. It’s the still the voice of the true Shepherd that you hear when you hear His Gospel purely preached, and His Word rightly explained, and when His words are spoken in connection with His Sacraments. It’s still the Lord God Himself, coming to His sheep who are still in the world, to seek the lost, to comfort the broken and the sick, and to gather His flock of Christians to Himself within His Holy Christian Church.

But there is still a third fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy, just as there was a third fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecies. Because, after Jesus is done gathering His sheep throughout the world, the LORD Himself will come again, in person, in glory, to gather His sheep on His right hand and to send all the others to His left.

And among those on His left will be all the false prophets who claimed to be the Chief Shepherd and the Holy Father of all Christians. They fooled many people here on earth, but they could never fool the Good Shepherd as they tried to steal His sheep from Him, nor, in the end, could they fool the true sheep of the Lord Jesus, because, as Jesus said in the Gospel, His sheep know the voice of their true Shepherd, and will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.

Always flee from the voice of the stranger, who presents you with an alternate gospel, and with doctrines of men instead of the teaching of God. You know your Shepherd’s voice. You’ve learned it from His Holy, inspired Scriptures. Keep listening. Keep following. And you can be confident that He knows and cares for each and every one of you, and will never let anyone snatch you from His hand. Amen.

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Called to follow the Good Shepherd

Posted on May 4, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Easter 2 – Misericordias Domini

1 Peter 2:21-25  +  John 10:11-16

The second Sunday after Easter is traditionally celebrated as Good Shepherd Sunday because of the Gospel you heard from John 10. And it’s all the more fitting today as we celebrate a confirmation. Two confirmations, actually. Because what is it to be confirmed? What is it to be a Christian, for that matter, other than to follow the Good Shepherd, our Lord Jesus Christ, wherever He goes?

Now, following the Shepherd does not mean becoming the Shepherd. That’s impossible. There can be only one Good Shepherd. Only the Lord Jesus could stand up to the wolf on behalf of the sheep, could stand up to the devil and take him on and defeat him, and rescue the captives from his kingdom, and gather His sheep and tend to them as His own. Only the Lord Jesus could suffer and die for the sins of the world and take up His life again. Only the Lord Jesus could turn unbelieving, impenitent sinners into believing sheep, who belong to Him, and who live within the sheepfold of His Holy Christian Church. Only the Lord Jesus knew how to go looking for His sheep and find them and bring them safely home into the Father’s house. Only the Lord Jesus could give life to the sheep, eternal life that knows no end, eternal life that includes the resurrection from the dead at the Last Day. He alone will speak over the graves of His believing sheep and raise us to life again and bring us into the heavenly sheepfold. Only the Lord Jesus knows His sheep perfectly and is known by them. And they follow Him wherever He goes.

But what does it mean to follow Him? Saint Peter gives us some examples in today’s epistle. He writes, For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow in his steps. To this you were called. To what were you called? To follow the Lord Jesus Christ, to follow in His steps.

Now again, there are steps that Jesus walked that no one else can ever walk. He is the eternal, only-begotten Son of God, whose first step toward our salvation was taking on human flesh in the first place, choosing to become man, born of the Virgin Mary. That’s not a step any of us can take. He took on the office of the Christ, as our true Prophet, Priest and King, to save us from our sins. That’s not a step any of us can take. He came preaching and teaching in the name of His Father. That’s only a step we can take if He Himself calls us to do it, if He calls us through the call of the Church, as it calls ministers of Christ to minister in His name.

But there are steps Jesus took in which Christians can walk by the power of the Holy Spirit and are called to walk. The first step that Peter mentions is this: He knew no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth. Well, that certainly wasn’t the natural state in which any of us was born. We all know sin by nature. And in one way or another, we all practice deceit by nature. Whether it’s to keep ourselves from getting in trouble, or whether it’s to take advantage of our neighbor. All have sinned, says the apostle Paul, and fall short of the glory of God. Or, as John puts it in his first epistle, If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. Whereas in the case of Christ the Good Shepherd, He never knew sin. He never practiced deceit. Ever. From the moment He was conceived, He was sinless, unlike the rest of us. He had no sinful flesh. No sinful nature.

So you can’t follow the Good Shepherd by being sinless. But the greatest gift Christ has given us is the forgiveness of sins. God promises to forgive us our sins, for the sake of Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. When we look to Christ, in repentance and faith, He wipes our slate clean before God. But when He does that, He also gives us His Holy Spirit. And He creates within us a new man, a new nature, who is able, at least to some degree, to walk with the Spirit. To say no to sin. To say yes to righteousness. To walk in holiness, as those who have been set free from sin and set apart from the sinful world. To live no longer for sin, but for Him who died for us and rose again. And so, in this way, you are called to follow in the footsteps of your Good Shepherd. To live for God and not for yourself. To recognize the path of sin in your life, each and every day, and to avoid it. To walk a different way, to walk in the way of Jesus, with love for God above all things, and with love for your neighbor, and with a special love for your fellow Christian. Your love can never equal His love or match His love. But you can strive to imitate it, to follow in His steps.

Liam and Kaity, you have learned God’s commandments. And you’ve learned Luther’s explanations of them, too. You know how Jesus walked, and you know how He calls on you to walk. So follow Him. All of you Christians, follow Him in this way, shunning sin, and running toward God’s commandments. Not as a way to be saved from sin, not as a way to earn eternal life, but as a way to follow in the footsteps of Him whom you call your Lord, your Savior, and your Shepherd.

But your Shepherd did not only show you by His example how to avoid sin and how to serve God by doing what was right. He also showed you by His example how to suffer with courage. Now, suffering isn’t something you choose. It’s not something you go looking for. You suffer things that other people do to you. But Jesus assures His sheep that if the world persecuted Him, then the world will also persecute His believers. If the devil went after Him, he will most certainly go after those who follow Jesus.

When that happens, there are two questions you will have to answer. First, will you agree to suffer for Jesus sake, or will you run away from suffering in order to save yourself? To accept the suffering that the devil and the world will bring on you is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who willingly accepted the suffering that His Father ordained for Him, who drank that cup of suffering, for as much as He didn’t want to drink it. So to follow Him is to accept the suffering that goes along with being a Christian. To follow Him is to walk toward suffering, if that’s what faithfulness to God requires, to take up your cross and follow Him.

The second question you will have to answer, if you are willing to follow Jesus into suffering, is how you will respond to it. Peter writes, When he was insulted, he did not hurl insults in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but turned it over to the one who judges justly. When the world comes after you for speaking the truth, when people mock you, or insult you, or exclude you, or make life hard for you because you hold to God’s Word and you follow Jesus, you could do what so many people do. You could grumble. You could complain. You could hurl insults back at those who insult you. You could make fun of people, just like they make fun of you, or even threaten them. But, as Peter reminds us, that’s not how Jesus responded to suffering, is it? He took it patiently. He took it without complaint. He turned it over to His Father, who judges justly, and who will see to it that those who hurt His children will answer for it in due time. So if you would follow in the steps of your Shepherd, you will respond to suffering in the same way, turning it all over to God the Father, turning it all over to the risen Lord Jesus, who reigns at the Father’s right hand.

And why will you do all this? Why will you follow Jesus in avoiding sin, and doing what’s right, and speaking the truth? Why will you follow Jesus toward suffering and not away from it? Because you believe in Him, which means you believe what Peter wrote about Him, that He Himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, should live for righteousness. By his wounds you were healed. For you were like sheep going astray. But now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

Why will you follow in the steps of your Shepherd? Because all your steps were leading straight to hell, and would have led there, if the Shepherd hadn’t come in to face the wolf for you, if He hadn’t taken responsibility for your sins, if He hadn’t laid down His life for you, if He hadn’t called you by name to make you His own. But He did, and now you are. And so you love Him. And anyone who truly loves Jesus also wants to listen to Him, and to imitate Him, to be like Him, wants to follow Him, and does follow Him. See, He has shown you the way again today!

Liam and Kaity, you’ve been following Jesus ever since your baptism, and your parents have been guiding you by the hand along the way. But now you have learned more about what it means to follow Jesus and are about to confess, before God and before this congregation, your determination to follow Him for the rest of your lives, just as all the members here have, by the grace of God, made the same confession, and the same commitment. May God strengthen you by His Spirit, through His Word and through His Sacrament, to persevere in His grace and in your walk as Christians, to walk according to your calling to follow in the steps of the Good Shepherd all the days of your life, until you follow Him into the eternal life of His heavenly pasture. May the blessing once written to the Hebrews be upon you today, and upon all the Christians here: May the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you complete in every good work to do His will, working in you what is well pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

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