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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Pastor Galler is away on vacation. This morning for our reflection on today’s Second Reading, Pastor Galler completed a sermon outline by The Rev. Gaven M. Mize, pastor of Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hickory, North Carolina. Rev. Mize’s sermon outline was published in the current volume of Concordia Pulpit Resources (28:3, 39-41), to which publication Pilgrim subscribes primarily in order to supply sermons on occasions such as this, when our pastor is away and the congregation has not otherwise supplied the pulpit. The adapted sermon reads as follows:
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
“Deeds not creeds!” cry voices from the American Evangelical past, yet a deed by itself hardly defines positivity or negativity. After all, murder is a deed, just as much as almsgiving is a deed. So much in life seems to live in the convenient land of ambiguity. It is nice there. You and I do not have to stand on any firm ground in that land; and, as long as we are doing something there, whatever we are doing has to be “just fine” with Jesus; after all, our deeds trump the creeds. Then again, perhaps what we confess about Jesus includes the work of the Holy Spirit that also strengthens us in faith toward Him and in fervent love toward one another. That is Christianity. We do not pit deeds against creeds, as deeds and creeds together can sing in harmony through the work of the Holy Spirit. Rather, we have been created by God the Father, redeemed and fed by God the Son, and called into faith and unity through God the Holy Spirit to live in faith and love. That work of the Holy Trinity in us is a theme of today’s Second Reading, which we consider this morning in this sermon titled, “Credo: ‘I Believe’ Is the Voice of All the Church”.
Today’s Second Reading is a part of the Divinely‑inspired St. Paul’s letter not only to the Ephesians but also to the whole Church, the Body of Christ, of all times and places. The letter originally may have been delivered to more than just the Ephesian congregations, circulated via multiple copies to several communities, with the copy to the Ephesians preserved for us. And, the letter is generally thought to have been written from St. Paul’s first imprisonment in Rome described in the book of Acts (Acts 28:11-31). For St. Paul, his imprisonment is not a great humiliation but a mark of the Christian life under the cross. And, as we heard, St. Paul calls all who hear or read his words to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which we have been called, including eagerly maintaining the unity in the Spirit in the bond of peace. The ninth‑century hymn translated for us as “Where Charity and Love Prevail” (Lutheran Service Book 845) describes well how the love of God for us at least should bring forth our confession of sins in faith toward God and our love for one another.
Yet, we do not always—and perhaps even seldom—love one another as we should. Instead, we grievously sin against one another. We replace “charity and love” with deceit and self-advancement. St. Paul urges us to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which we have been called, but we run toward the changing winds of our lustful and greedy desires. Paul calls us to bear one another’s burdens, but we dump our neighbors like a bad habit when a better opportunity comes along. We are to be the Body of Christ, yet we torture Him with our sins against one another. From his own prison, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote lamenting that the Body of Christ had been “blemished” and “scarred” in so many ways (Why We Can’t Wait [New York City: Signet Classic, 2000], 80). Yet, we have done far worse to the Body of Christ than the social injustice Dr. King described. We depart from one another, and we are broken and at horrible odds with our brothers and sisters in Christ, that is, the very members of the Body of Christ. To make matters even worse, we may despise the preaching of the Word of Christ, our Body’s Head, and we may doubt His Words that we confess. We are to be the Body of Christ, yet we torture Him with our sins against Him. We deserve temporal and eternal death, but St. Paul tells us that there is hope for us in that same Christ Jesus and in the Father’s forgiveness of sins and in the unity of the Spirit that the Holy Trinity brings about working in us.
St. Paul describes that hope in language that soon after gave rise to the Apostles’ Creed that the Church has confessed ever since the ink dried, as it were. There is one God and Father of all, Who is over all and through all and in all. As we confess, the Father created and preserves all things. But, grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Out of great love for you and for me, the Son descended to the earth and took on human flesh in order to give Himself into death, even death on a cross, to thereby make us right with the Father, so we can be forgiven and not die but live eternally. And, there is one Holy Spirit, Who has called us into the faith that leads us to love one another, as St. Paul describes. When, enabled by the Holy Spirit, we are sorry for our sins and trust God to forgive our sins for Jesus’s sake, then God does just that: God forgives our sins, all our sins, whatever our sins might be. God forgives our sins in the ways that He promises to forgive our sins, namely, through His means of grace, His Word and Sacraments.
We note well that St. Paul quotes the psalmist who prophetically sang both of Jesus’s Ascension and of His giving another gift, the Office of the Holy Ministry (Psalm 68:18), which at various times has been filled by prophets, apostles, evangelists, and teaching shepherds, or pastors. The men whom God places in this Office preach the Word of God’s law and Gospel, and they administer His Sacraments: Holy Baptism, individual Holy Absolution, and the Sacrament of the Altar. With God working through them in these ways, they equip the saints, do the work of ministry, and build up the Body of Christ. Thereby, we who repent and believe attain the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, spiritual maturity, the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, or by craftiness in deceitful schemes. But rather, speaking the truth in love, we grow up in every way into Him Who is the Head, into Christ, from whom the whole Body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
As sinners who have been brought into the Body of Christ through Holy Baptism, we are unified in good deeds, such as confessing the faith that St. Paul spells out for us in his letter from prison in the creeds that later resulted, not only that Apostles’ Creed, but also the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. Such Creeds are the voice of the Church, confessing the truths of Christ. As confessed in the Apostles’ Creed, we are unified in the “communion of saints”, the participation in the holy things, Christ’s Body in bread and Christ’s Blood in wine, pointed to by the manna, the bread from heaven that God in today’s First Reading (Exodus 4:1-16) promised to rain down upon His people, and Body and Blood that fulfill Jesus’s promise in today’s Third Reading (John 6:22-35) to give His flesh for the life of the world. With faith in God, we leave this table to love and serve our neighbors, including forgiving them as Christ has forgiven us, and we return here to again receive His forgiveness when we fail to love and serve our neighbors, as we will fail.
Some preschools have found a fantastic way of keeping the students together when they are going from one place to the next. Getting the children from the school bus to the classrooms and then from the classrooms to the playground or wherever used to be something like herding cats. More recently, though, teacher have taken to holding the end of a long rope and the children to each holding a bit of the rope, all staying in a single line while walking together calmly and heading toward where the teacher leads. We Christians also have a tether in the words of St. Paul and in the resulting creeds. Together, we confess the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Who have created and redeemed us and are sanctifying us. This tether reaches all the way back to creation and reaches all the way forward to the resurrection of the dead. This tether is what the Holy Trinity has done for us and in us, and so we believe and confess in faith and live in love the faith as summarized by Paul and expressed in the Creeds, to the glory of His Holy Name.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +