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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!)
Again this past week the President of the United States was tweeting about the mainstream media’s negative reporting about him, calling it “fake news”. That term “fake news” certainly has gotten more use since the start of the 20‑16 presidential campaign, but the term itself was around a while before that, and the deliberate spread of misinformation, to which the term usually refers, arguably goes back to the Devil’s temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:1-5)—the Devil is more than willing to share his tactics with everyone (Woelmer, CPR 28:2, 46). These days people are so suspicious of any reporting anywhere. For example, in a survey that I responded to this past week, a Baylor doctoral student asked to what extent clergy believed mental health reports from sources such as mainstream and social media. Pontius Pilate’s question, posed to Jesus inside the Praetorium, seems all the more appropriate: “What is truth?” (John 18:38). Of course, in today’s Gospel Reading Jesus tells us what truth is, He says that God’s Word is truth, and, in today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus also speaks of consecrating (or “sanctifying”) Himself for the disciples—and for us—so that they—and we—also may be sanctified in that truth. With the Holy Spirit’s help, this morning we will realize that “God sanctifies us in the truth of His Word”.
On this Seventh Sunday of Easter, we are positioned between the Ascension of Our Lord this past Thursday and Pentecost next Sunday, and we hear the Gospel Reading’s portion of Jesus’s so‑called High Priestly Prayer, which, as uniquely reported by the Divinely‑inspired St. John, Jesus prayed on the night when He was betrayed. As we heard, in this portion of the Prayer, Jesus makes two petitions in the form of polite commands to His Holy Father: namely, to keep the disciples in the Father’s Name and to sanctify the disciples—that is, to “make them holy”—in the truth of His Word. Those two petitions may well have the same basic meaning and, with Jesus’s speaking those things that night, the same purpose and end results: that the disciples may be one as the Father and Son are one, that they may have Jesus’s joy in themselves, and that they may be kept from the Evil One. Jesus knew what was coming for Himself and for the disciples, not only that night of His betrayal but also in the days and weeks ahead, even as Jesus knows our pasts, presents, and futures. Jesus knew then and knows now that we also need to be sanctified—that is, to “be made holy”—in the truth of His Word.
Through Moses in the Old Testament (Leviticus 11:44; 19:2; 20:26) and through Jesus in the New Testament (Matthew 5:48), God tells us to be holy and perfect as He, the Lord our God, is holy and perfect. But, God also tells us that we are conceived and born sinful (Psalm 51:5), unable on our own to make ourselves like Him as we should be. As we heard in the Epistle Reading (1 John 5:9‑15), there is a contrast between the greater always‑true testimony of God and the lesser and sometimes false testimony of people. The devil’s, the world’s, and our own false testimony or “fake news” about God and ourselves does not help our sinful condition: there are false claims, for example, that there is no God, that the Bible is made up, that one can be “spiritual” but not “religious” or churchgoing, that we decide for ourselves who has authority over us, that abortion is not murder, that marriage is for couples of any sex, that truth is what we say it is, and that we all are “all right” just as we are (confer Woelmer, CPR 28:2, 46). If we believe such false testimony or “fake news”, we will remain the children of transgression that we are by nature, and, like Judas, we will be children of destruction, lost eternally (Isaiah 57:4). But, God does not want us to be so destroyed, and so God calls and enables us to repent!
When, enabled by God, we do so repent—that is, when we turn in sorrow from our sin, trust God to forgive our sin, and want to do better than to keep on sinning—then God forgives our sinful nature and all our actual sin, whatever our sin might be. God forgives all our sin for the sake of His Son Jesus Christ. As we heard in the Epistle Reading, in contrast to the lesser false‑testimony of men like the Gnostic heretic Cerinthus, who said that God did not suffer in the flesh, the greater always‑true testimony of God is that God gave us eternal life in His Son, and St. John wrote those things so that we may know that we have eternal life (confer Woelmer, CPR 28:2, 44-45). In the Gospel Reading, Jesus, Who truly was God in human flesh, Himself said that He consecrated (or “sanctified”) Himself that we might be sanctified in the Truth of His Word (confer Psalm 119:142, 160). Jesus of course was without sin, so His “sanctifying” Himself can be understood as His making Himself a holy sacrifice for us on the cross (so, for example, Luther, ad loc Jn 17:19, AE 69:98‑99). Jesus is the Truth (John 14:6), and, being so full of truth, He also gives the truth (John 1:14, 17). The Truth of His Word about His death and resurrection for us changes us. God’s love for us in Jesus Christ chooses us out of the world and, as we believe in Him, brings us into the Church (John 15:29), where God makes us holy.
In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus speaks of our being sanctified as something we passively experience and so as something that God actively does. Normally we think of sanctification as the work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth (John 14:17; 15:26; 16:13; 1 John 4:6; confer 2 Thessalonians 2:13), but really sanctification can be ascribed to any Blessed Person of the Holy Trinity. As Jesus makes clear, we are sanctified by God’s working through His Word of Truth, and that includes the Word in all of its forms: with water in Holy Baptism, with the touch of the pastor in individual Holy Absolution, and with bread and wine that are Christ’s Body and Blood in the Sacrament of the Altar. As we participate in these rites and rituals, we by faith receive what God’s Word promises and puts in them: the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. The ministry of Word and Sacrament is so important that, as we heard in the First Reading (Acts 1:12-26), Scripture called for Judas’s apostolic office to be filled, as God led the apostles to do with Matthias, and as the Church has filled the Office of the Holy Ministry for millennia down to pastors today.
On the secular calendar, today is Mother’s Day, and, as we think of the positive care that many of us received from our mothers, we may recall that God Himself likens a mother’s care for her children to His care for His people (Isaiah 66:13). Similarly, in His High Priestly Prayer, Jesus says that He was keeping the disciples in the Father’s Name, with the result that they were guarded by Him, and Jesus prays that the Father would continue to keep them in that Name. Keeping them in that Name means keeping them in its sphere of power and in fellowship with Him and all those with Him (Bietenhard, TDNT 5:271-272). Although we are no longer of the world, we remain in the world, and we experience the world’s hatred of us, as it hates Christ and His Word—hatred, as we have been discussing in Midweek Bible Study, both because His law rightly condemns the world’s sin and because His Gospel rightly claims to be the world’s only way of salvation. The hating world not only rejects His Word but vehemently opposes it, and yet, whether we are sent as the apostles were or whether we live as Christians in our other vocations and thereby reach out to our neighbors lost in fake news (Woelmer, CPR 28:2, 47), Jesus says we are blessed even in such hatred (Luke 6:22). As we with God’s help resist the temptation and danger of falling away, He protects us, and the evil one does not touch us (1 John 5:18). In Jesus we have the ultimate victory over the world, and so we have peace and joy (John 16:33; 15:11).
As a former journalist, I used to defend the profession more, but defending it now is harder, given those who claim to be practicing it but really are not. When I left my last newsroom for seminary, I said I was going from reporting “news” to reporting “the Good News”, from reporting “truth” to reporting “the Truth”. No fake news here! With the Holy Spirit’s help, this morning we have realized that “God sanctifies us in the truth of His Word”, and so, as we hear His Word and repent, we are so sanctified!
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 + + +