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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
Some liturgically-minded pastors who do not feel properly equipped to fill in the gaps left by our latest hymnal’s calendar and corresponding propers might agonize too much over planning midweek services such as this one, while others might not agonize enough. Roman Catholic calendars appoint today as Easter Thursday, but Lutheran calendars end such weekday observances with Easter Wednesday. Timely in this year of the Reformation’s 500th anniversary, and appropriate for this occasion of the Circuit #14 April Winkel, Lutheran Service Book lists today as the “Commemoration of Johannes Bugenhagen, Pastor” (Bugenhagen is sometimes called “pastor of the Reformation”), but L-S-B appoints no propers (readings and such) for the Commemoration. Consulting different sources produces different ideas that were adapted to produce what we are using this morning—for me an agonizing process that Bugenhagen, who largely produced the Brunswick Church Order of 1528, himself might have appreciated. Thus, considering the Commemoration, its Gospel Reading from John 21, and the occasion for this weekday Divine Service, I have themed this sermon “Loving the Lord and Pastoring His Flock”.
Bugenhagen is also sometimes called one of the Reformation’s greatest scholars; for example, he helped translate the New Testament, organized church structures in a number of places, and served as superintendent of Saxony. Bugenhagen had been the Roman Catholic canon and rector of the school of Treptow in Pomerania (what is now northern Germany), before he was won to the cause of the Reformation by Luther’s 15‑20 writing The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Bugenhagen’s motto reportedly was “If you know Christ well, it is enough, though you know nothing else; if you know not Christ, what else you learn does not matter.” There is little doubt that Bugenhagen loved the Lord and so pastored His Flock.
Of course, “Loving the Lord and Pastoring His Flock” is largely what today’s Gospel Reading is about, and that regardless of whether one thinks the different Greek words used for love, feeding/pastoring, and lambs/sheep make important distinctions or are stylistic variations. You may recall that, on the night Jesus was betrayed, Peter claimed that, though the other disciples might all fall away because of Jesus, he never would (Matthew 26:33) and that he would lay down his life for Jesus (John 13:37). Jesus, of course, knew better and told Peter that that very night he would deny Jesus three times (Matthew 36:34; John 13:38), and that is just what happened.
We all might be hard‑pressed to count how many times we have denied or otherwise not loved our Lord, and we pastors no doubt also have failed in various ways to pastor His Flock as He would have us do. There are our own physical issues, our own personality quirks, and how we handle the personality quirks of others. There are problems in our congregations, such as declines or financial struggles, the guilt we rightly or wrongly bear for them, and the wrong ways that we might be inclined to address them. If only “Loving the Lord and Pastoring His Flock” were as easy as Jesus makes it sound in the Gospel Reading! Feeding and tending literal lambs and sheep might be easier!
Whatever Peter and Jesus might have done privately after Peter’s threefold denial and Jesus’s resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:5) and before the third appearance St. John records by Divine inspiration, in the part of that appearance that we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, Peter is “grieved” or “sorrowful” by Jesus’s threefold questioning (and perhaps also by thinking of his own attempt like Jonah to get away from Jesus earlier that morning [John 21:7]). We similarly are “grieved” or “sorrowful” by our sinful natures and our actual sins: our failures to love the Lord and pastor His Flock as we should, and all the other things we think, say, or do that we should not and the still other things that we do not think, say, or do that we should. From them all, God calls and enables us to repent, to turn from them in sorrow, to trust Him to forgive them, and to want to do better. When we so repent, then God forgives us for Jesus’s sake.
It was not Peter who first laid down his life for Jesus but Jesus, the Good Shepherd, Who laid down His life for the sheep—including you and me. The Father loves the Son because He laid down His life so that He might take it up again; no one took His life from Him but He laid it down of His own accord, having authority to lay it down and to take it up again. (John 10:11, 17‑18.) In keeping with prophecy the Good Shepherd of God’s people Israel was born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:6) to die on the cross in order to save us from our sins. As we sang in the Hymn of Praise today (LSB 950), our Savior Christ is our Shepherd and our true Lamb slain for our redemption. Mixing the Shepherd and Lamb metaphors used to bother me until I realized, teaching on that Hymn of Praise this past Sunday, that the Bible itself mixes them. In Revelation 7:17, one of the elders tells St. John, “the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their Shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (ESV). To be sure, Holy Baptism is such a spring of living water for us, giving us new birth from above by water and the Spirit (John 3:3, 5).
In today’s Old Testament Reading (Ezekiel 34:11-16), God strikingly says that He Himself will search for His sheep and will seek them out; that He will rescue them, bring them out, gather them, bring them into their own land, feed them, shepherd them, and make them lie down; that He will seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak. The Lord our Good Shepherd indeed does all those things, but He does so through means: through His purely preached Gospel and His rightly administered Sacraments, and so through the Office of the Holy Ministry. All of us first and foremost are recipients of His grace in all of these ways, in some cases even being part of the call processes for pastors, as Martin Luther was part of the process in the early 1520s that resulted in Bugenhagen’s coming to Wittenberg, where he served as Luther’s own pastor, including hearing Luther’s private confession and pronouncing individual absolution. Those of us who are pastors also have such responsibilities for reading and preaching God’s Word, baptizing, individually absolving, and consecrating and distributing the Sacrament of the Altar to children and adults, but we can be sure that the work ultimately is not ours but the Lord’s. And, as the disciples that morning by the Sea of Tiberias as day was breaking brought some of the fish they had miraculously caught but ate the meal that Jesus served them (John 21:9-14), so we are strengthened and nourished ultimately not by what we bring to the table but by what God provides us.
Our Good Shepherd enables all of us to repent and be forgiven of our sin and to love Him in return. Those of us who are pastors He also enables to pastor His Flock. We may or may not be inspired by the example of the blessed Johannes, but we take to heart the words of St. Peter, before whose denial the Lord told to strengthen his brothers (Luke 22:32), and who in the Epistle Reading (1 Peter 5:1-4) says, “when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory”. Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen. + + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +