Emmanuel Lutheran Church

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Sermon for Easter 3

1 Peter 2:11-20 + John 16:16-23

When you read a story for the first time, not knowing what happens next, you probably won’t catch the author’s full meaning as you’re going along. He’s likely dropping hints and clues, leaving open several possible outcomes, and including all sorts of details that you can only appreciate later on, after events unfold. Early on in the story, you don’t know the purpose of many of the setbacks and hardships that the main characters suffer, or where they’ll end up. Only later does it begin to make sense, when the author shows you where he was going all along. The early part of the story is usually characterized by question marks and confusion, on the reader’s part, and on the part of the characters themselves.

The same thing is true of the Christian life, where God is the Author, and we don’t know what, exactly, comes next. And if we don’t know what comes next, if we still have confusion and question marks, just try to imagine what it was like for Jesus’ disciples in the upper room on Maundy Thursday, just hours before Jesus would be betrayed, listening to Him—the Author—describe the future to them. We’re two thousand pages farther along in the story than they were. We have two thousand years of seeing how things played out, including on Good Friday, and, even more importantly, Easter Sunday. If we still have questions, you can understand why they were still so confused.

But even without knowing the details ahead of time, there is something you can know ahead of time, and that’s the point that Jesus is making with His disciples in today’s Gospel from Maundy Thursday. Life will be hard for a time. But in just a little while, things will get better.

“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. They had questions, 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. In a little while, 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, while the unbelieving Jews and Gentiles would rejoice. The disciples would be sad, but then things would get better, when Jesus appeared to them again, in that same upper room, on Easter Sunday evening. And then they would rejoice, just as Jesus promised.

But on that evening, when Jesus talked about going away, He wasn’t only talking about going away to death and the grave. He was also talking about going away to His Father in heaven, visibly leaving this world behind until He returns at the end of the age. In a little while, that is, in 43 short days, they wouldn’t see Him anymore during their earthly lifetimes. And during that time, for the rest of their earthly lives, they would know many times of sorrow, as they and their fellow Christians faced hatred, persecution, and death. During that time, the world would rejoice, because the world would think it had gotten rid of Jesus for good, and so they could do as they pleased with Jesus’ followers, too.

And yet, Jesus says that, in a little while, His disciples would see Him, and their sorrow would be turned into joy. Things would get better! When they closed their eyes in the sleep of Christian death, if even that death were a violent one, at the hands of wicked men, their souls would be taken to Paradise, where they would see Jesus again after the sorrow of this life was done. And things will get even better, 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.

So there are 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.

The life of every Christian is dotted with little whiles of sorrow, when, for His own reasons, God allows His children to experience sadness and sorrow and even near-despair—not the same for everyone, and that alone may cause sorrow for some! “If I’m sorrowful, what about those people?” But even those little whiles will eventually be replaced with something better. After we struggle through those difficult times, after we’re driven back to Scripture, and prayer, and humility, and meditation on God’s faithfulness, the Lord Jesus sends His Spirit again to bring comfort and joy. Here’s how Paul describes it in Romans 5: Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

Do you see what this means? As we make our way through the story of this life, not knowing exactly how things turn out, we’ve been given some vital information along the way, and promises from God to accompany that information. You may be confused about the future. You may have plenty of questions. But what do we know? We know that God gave His Son into death for our sins, and that our Savior was raised back to life, and that He now lives to reign on our behalf and to justify and sanctify believers. If you believe that, then you already know that things got better for us when Jesus rose from the dead, and better still when He grafted you into Himself through Holy Baptism, forgiving you your sins and granting you eternal life.

What else do we know? We know that, no matter what sorrows we may experience in this life, things will get, not worse, but better when we fall asleep in the sleep of Christian death. And we know things will get better still on the Last Day, when Jesus raises all the dead and brings us into the home of heavenly righteousness.

What else do we know about this story? We know that, in the midst of our sorrows here, God intersperses moments of healing and comfort and joy, when the Holy Spirit allows us to experience again the joy of His salvation, to see that God truly is working all things together for good to those who love Him.

In a little while, things will get better. And not just a little better! As Jesus says, A woman has sorrow when she is giving birth, because her hour has come. But as soon as she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of her joy that a human being has been born into the world. So it is that you also have sorrow now. But I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you. When a woman gives birth to a healthy child, things don’t just get a little better. The life that results from the labor of childbirth is immeasurably better than that brief time of painful labor, and more than worth it, as every mother knows. So, too, the sorrows we face in the story along the way will not be worth comparing with the glory to be revealed in us, as St. Paul writes to the Romans. Things will get immeasurably better when this story reaches its end, and the story of the new heavens and the new earth finally begins.

For now, knowing all that, God says, Be still. Be still, and know that I am God. In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. May the Holy Spirit carry these words deep into your heart today, so that you know for certain that what Jesus says is true. Things will get better. In just a little while. Amen.

Only audio of the sermon is available for today’s service. The sermon text is provided below. To download the sermon, click here.

 Sermon for Easter 2

1 Peter 2:21-25 + John 10:11-16

During the season of Lent, and even into Holy Week, we walked through Matthew 23 together, you remember?, where we heard what I called the harshest sermon ever preached by Jesus, against the scribes and Pharisees. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! Do you remember why He was so angry? It wasn’t because He was being personally attacked by them or personally targeted by them (though He was). It was because of the terrible, tragic damage they had been doing to God’s beloved people, to the precious sheep of the Good Shepherd, as worthless shepherds, doing grave harm to the flock entrusted to their care.

For those of you who were here on Wednesday, you heard the Good Shepherd again, tasking the apostle Peter, representing all the ministers of the Church, with “feeding His lambs, tending His sheep, feeding His sheep.”

In today’s Epistle, the same Peter was fulfilling that task Jesus had given him when he wrote to the scattered Christians and spoke of them as sheep who had once been going astray, but who had now returned to Jesus, the true Shepherd of their souls—the true Shepherd who, Peter says, bore our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, should live for righteousness.

All this talk about Jesus as a Shepherd and about His people as sheep and lambs is nothing new; it was pictured just this way in the Old Testament, from the 23^rd Psalm, to the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. And so, when Jesus refers to Himself as that Good Shepherd in today’s Gospel, He is just connecting all those prophecies to Himself.

And, in the same way, the harsh things Jesus said about the bad leaders of Israel, like the scribes and the Pharisees, comparing them to hirelings and worthless shepherds, were already there in the Old Testament, where God also spoke angrily against those who were misleading His precious sheep. Behold, says the LORD God, I am against the shepherds, and I will require My flock at their hand; I will cause them to cease feeding the sheep, and the shepherds shall feed themselves no more; for I will deliver My flock from their mouths, that they may no longer be food for them.

Instead of letting the worthless shepherds tend His flock anymore, God promised to come and shepherd His sheep in person. And that’s exactly what He did in the person of Jesus. And so we consider again today His comforting words about how He tends His own sheep, the ultimate example of the saying, “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”

The first thing Jesus did for His sheep, which He mentions elsewhere, but not here in the Gospel, was to gather them around His preaching and teaching. He once lamented to His disciples that the people of Israel were like sheep without a shepherd, without anyone to teach them well, and guide them to the truth of God’s word, and lead them to believe and to act rightly—because of what terrible leaders the scribes and Pharisees were. He didn’t gather the sheep by force, or by bribery, as with a shepherd’s crook, pulling and tugging them along. He simply gathered them with His word, and God the Father drew them, by the working of His Spirit.

The next thing Jesus mentions is where our Gospel actually begins: The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. But the hireling, who is not the shepherd and to whom the sheep do not belong, sees the wolf coming and abandons the sheep and flees. And the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. The hireling flees, because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep. The hireling represents the scribes and Pharisees, and all the worthless leaders of Israel who claimed to be leading the people toward green pastures, but were, in reality, leading them over a cliff. Those hirelings, those worthless shepherds, only cared about themselves, and their reputations, and their riches. They didn’t care about the souls they were supposed to be leading, or about God, either.

Jesus, on the other hand, was not a worthless shepherd, but a Good Shepherd—good for many reasons, but most of all, because He cared enough about His sheep to lay down His life for them. This is love, John writes, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son—gave Him into death. Or as Paul writes, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. And again, Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

That was the purpose of Jesus laying down His life, to be a sacrifice for our sins, to atone for our wrongdoings against God’s holy law. The wolf—the devil—was coming for us, and had every right to come for us, because of our transgressions of God’s Law, because we had violated God’s standard of right and wrong. Because of our sins, we were in the devil’s power, and we would have died eternally, subject to the devil’s torture. But the Father loved us, and the Son of God loved us. And not just loved us in theory, or in His heart, but loved us to the point of suffering for us and laying down His life for us as the sacrifice that enables all who believe in Him to escape from the dungeons of death.

What else is involved in Jesus’ tending of His sheep? He says, I know my sheep, and I am known by my own, as the Father knows me and I know the Father. That means He both knows who they are, and what they’re like, inside and out, and what they need, for this life and for the next. Every believer in Christ is known by Christ perfectly and completely. If He already laid down His life for you, before you ever knew or believed in Him, what won’t He do for you now, to make sure you get through this life safely—to get through this life and make it to the Day of Resurrection with your faith still intact, so that you can spend forever in the green pastures of the Good Shepherd?

And it goes the other way, too. Christ is known by His sheep, by those who believe in Him. You need someone, sent by Christ, to lead you to Christ through His Scriptures. You can’t know Him apart from His word. You need someone to baptize you into Christ; you can’t baptize yourself. But once you know Him through His word—the Jesus who is revealed to you from Genesis through Revelation—once you are baptized and believe in Him as true God and Man, as your crucified and risen Savior from sin, and as your Lord and Master, you don’t the leaders of a church, or a council of the Church, to tell you who He is. You know don’t need strangers on Facebook or Instagram to tell you who He is, and you certainly don’t need someone who doesn’t know Him rightly to tell you who He is. You know Him, and are able to know Him, from His word, because His Spirit lives in you and is always working through that word to show you your Shepherd, Jesus, and your Father in heaven who sent your Shepherd into the world in the first place.

And yet, just because you know Jesus, doesn’t mean He hasn’t left you in someone’s care until He returns for you on the Last Day. He knows you, after all, which means He knows the care that you need for your soul.

He says, And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice; and there will be one flock and one shepherd. Here Jesus is looking forward, past the time of His crucifixion and resurrection and ascension. He’s looking out into the first century, and the second, third, and fourth, all the way to the present time, all the way to the end of the world. And He sees and knows those who will believe in Him. And so, He must bring them into His flock! How will He do that? He’ll do it through the little shepherds He sends along the way, through the pastors and ministers of the Church, who aren’t sent to gather people around themselves, and their ideas, and their visions, and their great gifts and personalities—although far too many try. No, Christ gave some to be prophets, and pastors and teachers, to speak for Christ, to reveal Christ through His word, to baptize in the name of Christ, to call out, as Christ’s ambassadors, Be reconciled to God! God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that, in Him, we might become the righteousness of God. And then, as people are brought into the one flock, under the one Shepherd, into the One Holy Christian and Apostolic Church, the Shepherd doesn’t just sit back in heaven and watch. No, He’s there, doing the calling, and He’s there, tending to His flock through the ministry of those whom He has sent.

Now, as you know, those whom He has sent are all imperfect, and some are as worthless as the scribes and Pharisees were. But we have Jesus’ promise in this Gospel that He will not abandon His sheep. If anyone loves the truth, if anyone seeks the pure Gospel and begs the Lord to provide the ministry of it, even in the wilderness of this world, He will find a way. He will find a way to shepherd His flock, all the way up to the Last Day. He will tend His sheep, no matter what. And then, in the end, through the care the Shepherd provides, you and I will follow Him, together with all the faithful, into the greenest pastures you could ever imagine. Amen.

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Sermon for Easter 1

1 John 5:4-10 + John 20:19-31

You may have noticed that it’s increasingly difficult to know whom to believe in this world. Propaganda floods the news and social media. There are competing stories about just about everything that happens in the world. Even among those who call themselves Christians, there’s plenty of spin and, sometimes, outright deceit. The truth is, there is, truly, only One person you can and should trust blindly, trust completely. In a world full of liars and lies, believe Jesus!

In today’s Gospel, the apostles still had to learn that lesson. Put yourself back in the setting of that first Easter Sunday. The women came back from the tomb early in the morning and told the disciples what they had seen. Peter and John ran to the tomb and found it empty, and we’re told that John saw the empty tomb and believed. Sometime during the day Jesus appeared to Peter, and when Peter saw Jesus, he believed. That left nine out of the eleven remaining apostles who still had not seen any evidence for themselves, and were, therefore, still unconvinced, still unbelieving of all the reports. Now it was evening, and they were all gathered together in that same upper room where they had celebrated Passover and the Lord’s Supper with Jesus three days earlier—all except for Thomas, who had stepped out. The rest were shut in tightly, afraid of and hiding from the murderous Jews who had crucified their Lord.

And then, in the midst of the room, in the midst of their sorrow and fear and confusion, Jesus just appeared out of nowhere and said, “Peace to you!” He said it twice, so that there would be no doubt. Not only was He alive after being crucified, dead, and buried, but He offered them peace instead of the scolding—instead of the condemnation they deserved. “Peace to you!” He said, and He showed them His hands, where the nails had been driven through two days earlier, and His side that had been pierced with a spear, where the water and the blood had flowed out, leaving Him utterly drained of life. Not anymore. Now those “glorious scars,” as an Advent hymn refers to them, are there as signs of His victory over the cross and over the grave.

Then Jesus said something important to His apostles. As my Father has sent me, so I also send you. Now the sending of the apostles wasn’t exactly the same as the sending of Jesus. He was sent to be the Redeemer. They were sent to point people to the Redeemer. He was sent to be the one and only High Priest in the house of God, who would offer up the one and only true sacrifice for sins. They were sent, not to be priests at all, because all believers in Christ are now priests, authorized, not to make sacrifices to atone for sin, but to offer up our praises and our very lives as thank-offerings to God. No, the apostles were sent, not to be priests, but to be ministers of the High Priest, to speak for Him to the world, and to the Church, and to care for the precious flock of the Good Shepherd until He returns.

Jesus summarizes this sending with these important words: He breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. That was a promise of the gift of the Spirit that they would receive fifty days later, on the Day of Pentecost. And then He added, If you forgive the sins of any, their sins are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

Now, some people think that truth, objective truth, doesn’t exist, which means that there is no right and wrong, which means that there is no such thing as sin. But you know better. All people are born in sin, because of the sinful nature we inherit from our parents. And all people commit sins against God’s holy law, which sets the objective standards of right and wrong, and which objectively accuses all people of sin against God. All men are trapped in sin and death from the moment we’re conceived. But because Jesus was sent to pay for the sins of the world with His innocent suffering and death, and because He made that payment, in full, His ministers—those whom He sends—are now authorized to forgive sins in the name of the One who paid for them with His death.

Now, Jesus sent those men directly and authorized them to forgive sins in His name. After His ascension, it’s the Church that sends men to carry out the same ministry, still in Jesus’ name, and still with His authority. But the One who authorizes the forgiving also instructs His ministers whom and how they are to forgive. We are to forgive exactly as Jesus did, by calling sinners to repentance and to faith in Him, and by freely forgiving the sins of the one who looks for mercy through Christ, that is, of the one who believes. And the opposite authority is also given, to retain sins just as Jesus retained sins to those who disbelieved. The unbelieving Pharisees thought they were righteous apart from Christ, but time and time again, Jesus spoke judgment upon them: Your guilt remains.

Ministers have to do the same thing at times, telling people outside the Church that, even though they think of themselves as decent people, their guilt remains while they remain outside of Christ. And even to individuals within the Church, ministers must sometimes pronounce the awful sentence: “Because you refuse to repent of your sin, your guilt remains. Your sins are retained against you.” And according to Jesus, that terrible pronouncement is coming from God Himself, by His own authority.

But so is the forgiveness! So is the absolution! When the minister hears your confession of sins, including your sorrow over those sins and your intention to turn away from them, and then hears also your confession of faith that God will forgive you your sins for Jesus’ sake, the forgiveness he pronounces is valid before God in heaven. The same is true when he baptizes, as the apostles first used this authority from Jesus to baptize all who came forward to be baptized on the Day of Pentecost, who heard and believed Peter’s preaching, calling them to repent and be baptized in Jesus’ name for the forgiveness of sins. Those who have been sent by Jesus have the authority to act officially on His behalf, as His ambassadors, to forgive sins to the penitent and believing.

But Thomas missed out on all that on that first Easter Sunday. By the time he returned to the upper room that night, Jesus was already gone. And he immediately put a damper on the celebration of the other ten apostles. “We have seen the Lord!” they all told him. But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail prints in his hands, and put my finger into the nail prints, and place my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Now, we can’t blame Thomas too much, at least, not more than we blame the other apostles. They all had to see before they believed, too, although, to be fair, John believed before He saw Jesus Himself, seeing only the empty tomb that morning. But Thomas was stubborn in his unbelief, wasn’t he? Angry, even. It was a classic example of putting the Lord to the test. I will not believe in Him; I will not believe those whom He has sent; I will not believe what He promised, until He proves it, until I can experience it with my sense of sight and with my sense of touch.

How foolish, how ashamed he must have felt one week later, on the following Sunday, when Jesus finally appeared again, out of nowhere, and turned immediately to Thomas and said, Put your finger here. Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put your hand here and place it into my side, and do not be unbelieving any longer, but believing. Yes, Thomas, in his weakness, in his despair, in his fear, had tested the Lord. But the Lord took pity on him and gave him what he needed—what he needed, not only to believe in the resurrection, but to become an eyewitness of it. That generation of believers, who witnessed the Lord’s resurrection from the dead, would form the foundation of the Christian Church, by God’s own design. They should have all believed before seeing, because of Jesus’ own promise that He would rise, and because of the testimony of the faithful who had seen. But it was still essential for all of them to see.

It’s not essential for anyone else, though. Jesus said to Thomas, “Thomas, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.” But, if the apostles all needed to see to believe, why doesn’t anyone else? Because, throughout the coming millennia, the word of God, the word of the apostles, and the Holy Spirit working through that word, would be, as Paul calls it, the power of God for salvation to all who believe. The word of God is living and active, it says in Hebrews 4. My word will not return to Me empty, says the Lord, but will accomplish what I please, He says through Isaiah. That’s why John could so confidently write: To be sure, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, by believing, you may have life in his name.

Through the powerful, living and active word of God, you who have never seen the Lord Jesus have believed in Him—that He is the Christ, the Son of God, that He suffered and died for your sins, that He rose from the dead, and that God, through His appointed ministers, forgives you your sins for Christ’s sake and has given you eternal life in Him. Though you have not seen Him, Peter writes, you love Him; and though you do not see Him now, yet, believing in Him, you are filled with unspeakable joy and glory, because you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls. When doubts arise, when your faith is shaken, turn to the Word of Christ, where the risen Lord shows you His hands, and His side, and calls out to you, as He did to Thomas, “Believe!” Believe Jesus! And the Spirit of Jesus will see to it that you do. Amen.