Is God Trustworthy?

Biblical Text: Genesis 3:8-15, Mark 3:20-35

This sermon treats the Genesis text, which is the Adam and Eve fall into sin, and the gospel lesson, which contains two of Jesus’ most interesting phrases (“Binding the strong man” and “the sin against the Holy Spirit”), as something of problem and solution. There is a popular cynical way of reading the fall that my personal taste for farce and dark humor easily fall prey to. And I am in no way a good enough person to completely say it is trash. But a better person than I took me to task. Yes, the pass the buck. But the situation is the first sin. Everything prior, every experience to that point, everybody was completely trustworthy. Everything worked for the good of the neighbor. Imagine the shock the first time it doesn’t. There is no way Adam and Eve fully comprehended what had happened. At best they had some intuition. And part of that intuition would be some type of accountability. Who is most to blame? My fellow human? The serpent? God?

The Gospel Text is the explanation of the proof that God is and always has been trustworthy – the friend of sinners. Jesus has come to bind the strong man. Long bound in the serpent’s forged chains of sin, Jesus has come to be the man that crushed his head. The one that plunders his house. But it is a strange plundering. Because forgiven everything, we can be Stockholm syndrome captives of sin. The door out of the strong man’s house is wide open. But many choose to stay.

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Unbelief to Believing

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Biblical Text: John 20:19-31

At the word cloud would tell you, this is “Doubting” Thomas Sunday. But there are really two things in the text. The Thomas story is one of unbelief to belief and the things that stand in the way. The biggest of them I think is simply shame. The sermon goes into that in the 2nd half. The first half is the commissioning of the disciples. We believe, how then do we live? Jesus gives some directions here. The first half of the sermon looks at what it means to be sent as Christ was sent and the role of the Holy Spirit.

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A Singular Occurance

Biblical Text: Matt 28:1-10
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I forget where I heard it but I heard a great quote recently. “It is not that people don’t believe in the resurrection, it is that they don’t believe it happened only once.” Or something close to that effect. This Easter Sunday sermon takes a look at what resurrection really means and how it is part of our existence contrasted to apparently both popular and elite understanding. The primary touchstone is that it is not generic resurrection, but it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Resurrection is in Christ.

Worship Note: You can’t really capture Easter Service on a recording. The Spirit might work in different tongues, but recorded is not something that captures him all that well. I’ve left in our Choir’s piece, the Easter standard Christ the Lord is Risen Today. I’ve also left in the closing hymn Now All the Vault of Heaven Resounds, LSB 465.

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Stop The Unbelief

Text: John 20:19-31
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Okay, I’ll admit that this is one of my geekier sermons. Although I think even if you completely don’t get what I’m talking about in the middle, the introduction and the application or gospel in the world section work.

Why this is so geeky is because it is an attempt to identify something that we are dealing with but has not been completely defined to the point of say “well duh”. Trying to compress it I think our society has a hard time believing anything. That unbelief is not you garden variety doubt, which I would label as just part of the Christian life. The older saints would call it poetically a dark night of the soul. Thomas doesn’t doubt, he believes something else entirely. He believes is wood and steel and Roman power and his senses and dead things stay dead. When Jesus appears the command is not stop doubting and believe, but stop the unbelief and believe. Now I said Thomas believed in something (wood and steel, cross and spear, the marks in the hands and the side), but belief in idols is no belief at all. Idols have no real existence, so belief in them is unbelief. Jesus tells Thomas, to stop the idolatry. And that is our problem. Our old idols of nation, race, ideology and even church have failed. And postmodernism has convinced us to not get fooled again. But the problem is that we don’t have a choice. We are contingent creatures. We all rest on something. The default metaphysical dreams are our bellies or nothingness or gussied up mammon and nihilism. Those are the idols of post-modernism. And they are bad ones. The command issued by Jesus to Thomas caught in both is stop the unbelief and believe. Christ is the true cornerstone that we can build upon. All the old idols have been knocked down, but they have been knocked down so that we might see Christ. Not so that we can find worse idols.

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