Tag: elections

Authority: Temporal and Eternal

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Biblical Text: Matthew 5:1-12

The day on the Church calendar was All Saints (Observed). The day on the secular calendar is election week. It is a good time to talk about the Kingdoms of the Law and the Kingdom of the Gospel. And that is what this sermon does. It first talks a bit of doctrine. What does the church teach about authority? And the basic teaching is that all authority is God given. The real question is how it is used and how it is ordered. Rightly ordered authority places the temporal under the eternal. Rightly used temporal authority is used for the love of God and the good of our neighbor. But the role of temporal authority is primarily a curb (first use of the law). The role of gospel authority is to justify and sanctify sinners.

The sermon, reflecting on the beatitudes (the gospel text for the day), then tries to draw some applications for how Christians live in the overlap of both legitimate Kingdoms. And how our hope – realized by the church at rest, those All Saints we remember – is the perfectly sanctified sitting on the throne and the joining of the Kingdoms. Not yet, but soon.

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We Have Found Him

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Biblical Text: John 1:43-51
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This is the season of Epiphany, after Christmas but before Lent. It has been my experience that the Epiphany lessons for each year have a separate theme. Some years focus on the light aspect. This year is discipleship. We get a steady stream of conversion and following Jesus accounts. The text for this week is Philip and Nathanael. What this sermon explores are the doctrines and attitudes contained in Philip’s assertion to Nathanael, “We have found him”. The idea of who finds who is taken up in the Christological section. The text and Christian doctrine asserts that Christ finds us, yet we tend to talk like Philip in the active voice. Call it the paradox of the election and conversion. The second doctrine is the order of the titles: Kind of Israel, Son of God and Son of Man. The son of Man, the new Adam, is the one of greatest theological importance. That is the one that defines the others and that angels attend.

The attitudes examined are contained in what Jesus praises in Nathanael – one without guile.

We conclude with the idea of discipleship as a continual coming to see. One day we will see clearly.

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