Authority: Temporal and Eternal

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Who’s Blessed?

Full Sermon Draft Download

Biblical Text: Matthew 5:1-12

How we use the word saint in the English language has a couple of meaning that are somewhat contradictory. This All-Saints Day sermon ponders those categories of saints a bit and then turns to who and what Jesus calls blessed.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What (or who) is a Saint?

Biblical Text: Matthew 5:1-12
Full Sermon Draft

Who is a Saint is an interesting question. The typical answers I think fall into three categories.
a) Anyone we loved who has died. This is the generic or default answer. It is either just being nice or an unthinking universalism.
b) All those who have faith in Jesus. This the “Protestant” answer.
c) Those displaying heroic virtue. This is the “Catholic” answer.

All of these are bad answers, and all of them have a bit of the Truth. On All Saints Day (observed) this sermon attempts to ponder that question and why each one of those is a bit wrong. It also attempts to think about what a better answer would be. It then encourages us to take action in our lives. The theological engine is the distinction that Luther drew between passive and active righteousness. Passive is our righteousness before God. Only God can make saints. Active is our righteousness towards our neighbors. A tree, or a Saint, is recognized by their fruits. The sermon attempts to hear and sort and apply the word to our lives in Christ.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In The Zone

Text: Matthew 5:1-12
Full Sermon Draft

The Beatitudes (Blessed are the poor in spirit, etc.) are the poetic introduction to the Sermon on the Mount. In Epiphany, the liturgical season given to coming to know who Jesus is, that sermon is assigned reading over five weeks. I won’t call it a sermon series for a couple of reasons, mostly because that phase annoys me, but also because I’d be worried by week 5 that even my regulars would be ditching services. More seriously, the sermons will be connected because the text is naturally connected, but it isn’t a forced connection.

So this sermon attempts to do three things:
1) Re-introduce into our imaginations the “Blessed are…” statements. We hear them, but they don’t engage the imagination as to what they actually mean because “blessed are…” is both too well known and too little understood. We’ve been inoculated to it. I want us to be infected with the Kingdom that Jesus is preaching.
2) Hear the gospel in these statements and not just a list of “well, I gotta do that.” Part of prodding the imagination is seeing a world where I would freely choose what Jesus describes.
3) Start laying the ground work for the connecting theme of compulsion vs. freedom.

Worship note: You can hear our recently growing choir in a couple of spots. This was a 5th Sunday where our choir supports the liturgy. I didn’t include the Chanted Intoit, but you can catch the gradual and the verse in the midst of the Alleluias. I have left in our closing hymn, LSB 690, Hope of the World. We sang stanzas 1-4. The tune is the workable EIRENE which grows on you once you grasp its internal stress and direction. The text is an deep contemplation not on the simple hope of a Deus ex Machina, but of the hope of becoming fully human in Christ.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Witness

Biblical Texts: Rev 7:9-17, 1 John 3:1-3, Matthew 5:1-12 (All Saints Day)
Full Sermon Draft

All Saints Day officially was Nov 1, but we observed it today. It is one of those festivals or celebrations that I do every thing I can to raise its profile. In my strange head it should be The Lutheran festival. Roman Catholics reserve saints for institutionally proclaimed brand names. The various flavors of reformed observe a strict separation of the communion of saints and attempt not to use the word for the most part. It is the Lutheran church that both holds up the great and the local as witnesses of the faith, and only a sacramental church can maintain anything but historical connections with the church at rest. Just some stray thoughts roughly in line with the Augsburg Confession on the Saints.

The sermon itself does three things. It examines one perversion and one mistake in the witness that have hurt the church in the last generation. The primary effect is the eclipse of the cross, but you could also say that it is the movement of sovereignty of God to us. It then proclaims what I think is the consistent witness of the saints – today the cross, tomorrow the crown; the offerings of the world pale in comparison to the life in Christ regardless of its temporal trials. It concludes with the challenge of the middle section of the beatitudes. Are we willing to live life in this world according to the way of Christ? The saints did. The saints do. Are we knights of faith? Is the story of the church, the witness of the saints compelling and binding on us?

Worship note: I left in the recording two hymns. LSB 677, For All the Saints, is a great hymn that tells the full story. And I left in our concluding hymn, LSB 662, Onward Christian Soldiers. In think the progression of hymns reflects the message. We gather to remind ourselves of who we are and what our story is. Then we go out to live it. Onward until our day of rest.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Kingdom Bill of Rights – All Saints Celebration

Biblical Text: Matthew 5:1-12
Full Sermon Draft

Nurse Kaci Hickox is a fascinating sign, an almost perfect illustration of this age. What looks like heroic compassion combined with staggering amounts of narcissism and selfishness.

Keying off of her invocation of her rights, this sermon puts forward the beatitudes as a “Kingdom Bill of Rights”. Unlike our typical invocation of rights, which are always about justice for us, the Kingdom rights point always toward God or toward our neighbor. They are costly. They are love. And they are what Christ has done for us.

Being All Saints celebration, this sermon then meditates on how the saints serve the people of God as lights in dark places and tells the story of a couple such lights.

Note: the choir between the First and Second readings of the day is our Children’s Choir.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download