First Wednesday in Lent 2012

9/26/12 Psalm 32 Title: Hiding from God or Hiding in God? (Psalm 32) In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Our text for today is Psalm 32, which we prayed earlier in the service. We will also be examining the Office of the Keys as they are found in God’s Word, so we can get a better understanding of what God means when he says he has given to his Church the right to lock and unlock the door to heaven. Have you ever hidden from God? Psalm 32, written and prayed by King David compares the man who hides from God to the man who hides in God. And this has nothing to do with what is going on from the outside. Like Adam and Eve, like King David, and like Judas Iscariot from our reading today we excel at hiding from God. I may be able to walk down the street and convince everyone that I meet that I am good Christian because I lead an upright and moral life. I am not like those sinners. We are very good at hiding our thoughts and actions. You can keep your thoughts of betrayal and adultery to yourself. You can keep your thoughts of coveting and wishing for something that isn’t yours under control. You can even turn gossip into sounding like it is oh so much sympathy for whoever happens to be under attack. Yes, we can hide our sins very well. Hiding from God, however is another story. Hear David in verses 3 and 4 say, “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” In other words when we hide our sin from God, it has consequences. We’ll hear about others who tried to hide their sins from God in the weeks to come, but one of the consequences of our trying to hide our sins from God, is something we all know well; guilt. It eats at you. It won’t go away. You may cover it with work or alcohol or whatever distracts, but guilt will not go away. That is God’s Law coming to bear on your life. It’s uncomfortable. It’s painful. It’s supposed to be for that is what the law does. The Gospel message of forgiveness heals, but the law kills. But your Old Adam, your sinful nature, even though you know that the law kills and the gospel heals just doesn’t want to let go of the law and come clean before God. And so, unless one’s heart has become hard to the law where it no longer condemns you, your sin weighs on you; it holds you down. You may be able to put on a happy face for the time you or in church, or for the day, or the week, or even a month, but the guilt is always there and it hurts. That brings us back to God’s purpose, as it is written in Psalm 32:1. “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” We somehow get this crazy idea in our head that God is pleased with us when we cover up our sins and keep a happy face. But it is just the opposite. God is pleased when we confess our sins, so that He can do His work of re-creating us in His image. God wants to forgive our sins more than anything in the world. That is what He lives for. That is what He died on the cross for. He is dying to forgive you. The angels in heaven rejoice over one sinner who repents. That’s you and me, and everyone else who has ever lived, is living, and will live. God in His mercy has given the keys, the binding and loosing keys, to his Holy Church to forgive sins. In other words, this is the place where God comes to forgive your sins. God does this in several ways. He forgives your sins through preaching, through the hearing of God’s Word, through the Lord’s Supper, through Baptism, and through absolution which is just a church word for “forgiveness.” There are two specific ways that God absolves, or forgives your sins in his Christian Church. One you know very well, the other you may not know at all. The first is called the general Confession and Absolution. The other is called Individual Confession and Absolution. This one you may not know at all. This is when someone comes to the pastor privately and confesses their sins. This is usually done when a person is troubled by specific sins. Private confession and absolution is seldom used anymore and has not been for a long time. Even Martin Luther in the fifteen hundreds bemoaned of the lack of private confession when the people found out that they no longer had to confess their sins to the priest. We by nature, rather than confess sins to the person God has put in our midst to hear confession and give absolution in God’s name would rather wallow in our sin, no matter how miserable our lives have become. I have made a private confession to a pastor and I actually think the forgiveness spoken by the pastor was better than the forgiveness spoken in the general absolution on Sunday morning. Same words, but this time they were spoken to just me. My fellow brothers and sisters in Christ even though you might never receive the wonderful blessing of private confession and absolution take advantage of the general confession and absolution spoken on Sunday morning. You are not receiving my forgiveness, but God’s forgiveness when I say, “I forgive you of your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Listen to Jesus’ call, “Come to me who are heavy burdened and I will give you rest.” Turn, flee to God’s mercy. Flee to Jesus Christ and His Word of absolution. Hide in God, not from God, and God will protect you, and hold you in the palm of His hand. Amen

First Sunday in Lent 2012

First Sunday in Lent 02/26/12 Text: Mark 1:9-15 and Matthew 4:1-11 Today, we are going to take a look at our Gospel reading for this morning. Saint Mark, as you have, I am sure noticed, is a man of few words. He gets to the point of what he wants his readers to know leaving us to go to the other gospel writers to fill in the details. The same is true for today’s gospel reading. He gets right to the point and it happens fast. There are two basic lessons we are to learn from this gospel reading. First Jesus in his baptism did what we are to do; be baptized, so that just as Jesus in his baptism received the Holy Spirit we too have received the Holy Spirit in our baptism. The second lesson for us that when God the Father said to Jesus “You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased.” he is saying that Jesus is God Incarnate and that he is doing what he is supposed to do, something we just can’t seem to do; trust in God, love others as himself, and obey the commands of God. In other words he is living a god pleasing life in our place. Remember that I said earlier that when you read the Gospel of Mark you need to fill in the gaps, so to speak, with the other gospels that you get the rest of the story. So take out at the half-sheet that you were given when you came into God’s house this morning. The text that you are looking at is Matthew 4:1-11. These inspired words of Saint Matthew are going to fill in Mark’s account of Jesus’ temptation, so you can get a better understanding of God’s plan of salvation. For, as you will see, it is not just Jesus’ death that saved us. It is his whole live. Jesus is in the wilderness, which in the Bible almost always stands for a place of desolation and danger. It was where the people of Israel wandered for forty years after disobeying God at Mount Sinai. It took them 38 years before they completely relied on the Lord to save them and even then it was only because all of the Israelites’ men of war had died and there was no army to defend them, as they going through the lands of people who wanted to kill them. It was in that 40 year wilderness journey that they learned to rely on God alone for food and water when they were without food and water. It was there that their clothing and sandals did not wear out. It was there that they learned that God would protect them through the good times and bad times. The wilderness thus is seen as a place of being refined. I mention this because Jesus is doing what the Israelites did not do. Where they had enemy armies going against them Jesus had wild animals going against him. Where they went at times without sufficient food Jesus went without food. They failed miserably when they were tempted by the things around them. Jesus passed with flying colors when he was tempted. Jesus did what they and we cannot do; completely trust in God, for all his needs. Let’s take a look at the three temptations that Satan laid out before Jesus, for in those three temptations are found the basis for all sin that we struggle with in our lives. With the first temptation Satan hits Jesus with; although the Gospel writer does not use these words they are implied, “Jesus, you can’t really trust God. Look, it has been forty days and he has not helped you yet. You need to take care of yourself.” All I can say it is a good thing that Satan used that temptation on Jesus instead of me, for I am afraid that after forty days without food I would have followed Satan’s advice and made bread out of the stones. You have to take care of yourself don’t you? I know God says he will provide for body and soul, but what if he doesn’t? Trusting God completely is not part of who we are even as Christians, so we are in desperate need someone to completely trust in God to take care of him and that person is Jesus. He did what we cannot. The second temptation while it might look like Satan is just asking Jesus to show how much he trusts God’s promises; is really about getting Jesus to show a lack of trust in God’s Word for as Jesus says, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Testing God is never a good thing, for it shows a lack of trust. Jesus had to resist this temptation for we test God quite often. You don’t think so? Think about it. How many times do you ask God to do something while not really believing that he will do it and then when he does do it your surprised? That my dear brothers and sisters is testing God which as I said, but more importantly Jesus said is never a good thing. The next temptation for Jesus, is for him to want more than he has been given. Remember that in his humanness Jesus has not been given all things yet. When Satan made his offer Jesus has a choice to make. He can be the rightful ruler of all that is created the hard way through his suffering ending in his death. Or he could have it all without going through all the suffering and death and as an added bonus he can it now. Wait for God has promised him or get it now! That is the temptation. I have no doubt that most of us would go for getting it now, as we think it would not really hurt anything because we would only go through the outward motions when we worshiped Satan. You think that is farfetched? It really isn’t, for there is a Christian pastor in Iran sitting in jail right now who has been sentenced to death for worshiping the Triune God. The government has told him all he has to do to save his life is say that he believes only in Allah which is the Arabic name for God. What harm would come from doing that? God and Allah are just names. They both mean God. What is the harm? While, if he recants his faith in the Triune God he won’t be given the whole world he would be given his life and when you get down to it saving one’s life is what it is all about anyway; isn’t it? Compare him to a reporter who was, according to him, raised a Christian, but in order to get into a country to get the story that might make him famous recanted his belief in the Triune God to become a Muslim. He said in the interview that I watched that it does not make any difference anyway because God is God no matter what he is called. Both men have to decide whether to worship Satan or God. As sinners we need help to save ourselves from ourselves. We, as God’s Word tells us were enemies of God and deep down in our sinful bodies we still would rather be walking away from him than walking toward him. We need help and the only one that can give us the help we need is Jesus. He is the only one because he is the only human that has or ever will live that did not succumb to the sinful desires of the body, but completely trusted in God’s promises to do what God says he is going to do; take care of him in this life and the next. He trusted in those promises and what did it get him, a terrible death nailed to a cross. But in that terrible death he satisfied God’s wrath toward us. There is a saying that most Christians believe is right out of the Bible. I have even said it from time to time, “God hates the sin, but loves the sinner.” The problem with that statement, is that it is not in the Bible. God’s Word is very clear on that subject. God hates sin and the sinner. He has to, for he is holy and thus cannot stand sin or sinners. To say that “God hates sin, but loves the sinner.” and quit there is to take Jesus out of the picture, for according to God’s Word God loves the sinner, not because the sinner is lovable, for in God’s eyes the sinner can never be lovable, because after all he is a sinner who sins. We are, even as good as we think we are or how much faith we believe we have are completely left out of the salvation act. We have nothing to do with it, since we are only the recipients of the love God has for Jesus because it is only in Jesus faithful, sinless life, and death that we are forgiven. That is good news my dear brothers and sisters in Christ. Amen