For me, every sermon I’ve preached for the past thirty-seven years has started with prayer for the Holy Spirit’s guidance.
Typically, the process proceeds to sitting down and making notes on the text, including little reminders of Scriptural words, ideas, and motifs I suspect are at play in the text. As an example, my initial notes for this week are shown.
After this, I go to the original Greek of the text, in the case of the New Testament, or the Hebrew, in the case of the Old Testament. I’ll translate the Greek, which I know, and consult an online “interlinear” literal translation of the Hebrew texts because I never learned Hebrew. I’ll do studies of individual words in the text that seem important to me.
Then, I study what Biblical scholars have to say about the text.
To help me frame the sermon, I then try to articulate what the Law and Gospel couplets are in the text.
What are Law and Gospel?
‘The Formula of Concord,’ one of the basic confessional statements of the Lutheran Christian movement, says this about the Law. “Everything that proclaims something about sin and God’s wrath is the proclamation of the law, however and whenever it takes place.”
When a passage in Scripture reveals our sinful human nature that’s the Law. As the apostle Paul says, the most that God’s Law can show us is our unrighteousness. God’s Law is unable to give us a right standing with God. Preachers who only proclaim God’s Law or their own warped versions of that Law—as the Pharisees often scorned by Jesus did—render a disservice to God and those who hear them. If a sermon is only a guilt trip, it’s not a sermon.
The Gospel is altogether different from the Law, although the Law points us to our need of the Gospel.
Martin Luther wrote: “The gospel…does not preach what we are to do or to avoid. It sets up no requirements but reversed the approach of the law, and says, ‘This is what God has done for you; he has let his Sin be made flesh for you, has let him be put to death for your sake”…the gospel teaches exclusively what has been given us by God, and not—as in the case of the law—what we are to do and give to God.“
As one Baptist pastor writes: “Roughly speaking, the gospel is that Jesus died on the cross as your substitute and rose again from the dead. Jesus took away the sins of the world, including your sins…” (Shawn Lazar, ‘One Point Preaching’)
One of the things for which I repent when I look back on my old sermons is how often my sermons have amounted to faithless law diatribes rather than faithful calls to both repentance for sin and new life and forgiveness from the God now revealed to all people in Jesus Christ.
Once I’ve decided on a Law/Gospel couplet—most texts have many possible couplets, I come to the hard part. That’s finding the entry point, an idea, a story, a thought, that can help people enter into and be entered by the text and that may serve as a continuing motif by which the Holy Spirit can do His work on both congregation and preacher. The primary work of the Holy Spirit is described by Jesus in John 16:7-11 as basically to convict us of our sin and to convince us that God gives Jesus righteousness to those who believe in Jesus. “The work of God [for human beings] is this,” Jesus says in John 6:29, “to believe in the One He has sent.”
That’s how a sermon should end, assuring people we can trust that Jesus, God the Son, through His death and resurrection, has done everything necessary to eternally save us from our sinful selves. Our call is, by the power of God’s Spirit, the One Who gives the gift of faith, to trust in Jesus and what He has accomplished for us on the cross.
My aim in writing my sermons is to say enough but not too much. I write three pages, a space-and-a-half between lines, in 14-point Arial font. Sometimes, the sermons go just a little over three pages, others a bit less.
It’s by processes like these, I’m sure, that pastors all over the world try week after week to share the truth about you and God and to extend God’s grace to you. It’s wonderful, rewarding work, and some weeks, by the power of the Holy Spirit, it actually happens in helpful ways.
[Below is a video of today's 11:00 AM worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. After that, you'll find the text of today's message. God bless you this week with a growing faith in Jesus Christ.]
I was ten years old when my mom spoke words to me that have had an impact, both good and ill, on me ever since.
She said: “I wish I knew your IQ. You are so intelligent, Mark.”
On the one hand, those words helped me, for the rest of my life, to feel free in loving to learn.
On the other hand, they have sometimes made me arrogant. Such can be the impact of words spoken by human beings like my mom.
In light of that then consider how much greater the impact can be of words spoken by the Word made flesh, Jesus, God the Son.
It is Jesus the Word Who is the means by which we come to saving faith in Him. As Saint Paul says in one of my favorite passages in Scripture: “...faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ…” (Romans 10:17)
But it’s possible to hear the Word of God and spurn Christ, faith in Christ, and the life with God now and in eternity that God gives to those who believe. This happens when human hearts are hardened to God, caught up in the greatest idolatry of all, the worship of self. As we will see today, it even happens to people who confess faith in the God now revealed in Jesus.
In our Gospel lesson for today, Luke 4:16-30, Jesus returns to His hometown of Nazareth. News of His ministry, filled with the proclamation of God’s Word and miraculous signs, have reached the folks here. He returns to Nazareth as a celebrated rabbi of rising importance. In those days, when a recognized rabbi visited the synagogue on the Sabbath, they were invited to read one of the appointed lessons for the day. On the day that Jesus visits the Nazareth synagogue, He finds the appointed text from Isaiah, and, having recently been affirmed by God the Father at His Baptism, where God the Holy Spirit also anointed Him as Messiah, He reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19) God first gave these words to Isaiah to tell the people of Israel, hundreds of years before, that their exile under foreign conquerors would end. It did end. But when Jesus preaches in Nazareth He says that this Word is also about Him. “Today,” He tells the worshipers, “this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21) Jesus claims that God has anointed Him to speak His Word that first, proclaims the Good News, or the Gospel, to the poor, whether their poverty is financial or spiritual. He has come to those who, like you and me, are born helpless, unable to resist the temptation to sin and death that comes to us from our human nature, from the world, and from the devil. Jesus has come also to set free all those held as prisoners, in bondage to sin and death, like you and me. He has come to give sight to those who are blind both physically and spiritually, incapable without God’s Word coming to them, of seeing the God of undeserved grace.
And Jesus comes to bring the year of the Lord’s favor. This last “mission” of Jesus is wrapped up in the Old Testament provision for ancient Israel of a Jubilee year, which came every fifty years.
In Jubilee years, God said in Leviticus, all prisoners were to be released, whatever their crimes; all debts were to be forgiven, however much the debt was; and all families were to be given back the properties to which they were entitled when their ancestors first entered the Promised Land, no matter if the property had been lost through mismanagement or misfortune.
The Jubilee year was a time of pure grace, undeserved forgiveness, and new life.
Now Jesus is proclaiming the Jubilee of all Jubilees, one to last for all eternity. This Jubilee brings eternal forgiveness and eternal life with God to all who believe in Him. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Initially, Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes react positively to this Word. They feel a pride of ownership and entitlement.
But as will happen with Jesus’ fellow Jews (and with their Gentile overlords) on Good Friday two years later, they can’t accept that someone with whom they think they’re familiar could be Who He claims to be.
They demand that Jesus prove Himself by performing a sign for them, a miracle like the ones He’s done in other places. But they have the cart before the horse. The miraculous signs of Jesus’ power over life, death, destitution, and eternity have always been performed in the lives of those who first, however tentatively, believe the Word about Him as the Savior Who brings God’s salvation.
The Nazarenes want what they can get out of Jesus without trusting in Jesus. They want faith without repentance. They want goodies without discipleship.
This is often our problem too, which is why so many Christians are babies in their faith even though the Gospel Word that brings faith in Christ and growth in that faith has been shared with them many times. Hebrews 4:12 tells us, “...the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”
Now, like a skillful surgeon, Jesus wields the Word of God to cut away the fatal growths of ethnic, religious, and familial pride–sin–that would prevent His Word from giving His fellow Nazarenes the gift of saving faith He wants to give to all. “Surely…you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.,” Jesus tells them. He reminds the Nazarenes that in Old Testament times, God sent the prophet Elijah, not to all the Jewish widows who may have felt themselves entitled to God’s favor because they were Jews, sending him instead to a widow who was a foreigner.
And God didn’t use the prophet Elisha to heal a Jewish leper, but a leper who commanded a foreign army.
God sent His prophets to perform signs of His grace to these foreigners because they admitted that without the God long revealed to the Jews, they were poor, imprisoned, blind, and oppressed by sin and darkness. They knew how much they needed God, the God now revealed to all of us in Jesus.
Do we know how much we need Jesus every single day? Or do we only turn to Jesus when we think we could use Him?
Are we willing to daily repent and believe in Jesus' Word? The people of Nazareth are too proud to receive grace. And now, having heard Jesus’ powerful, life-giving Word of grace, we witness the powerful impact of Jesus’ Word on those who refuse to believe.
The hometown crowd realizes that Jesus is telling them that they have no special hold on God, that God loves all people, that their self-righteousness and ethnic pride don’t impress God. So they take Jesus to the brow of the hill on which Nazareth is builtg to throw Him over the edge to His death.
It’s here that Jesus actually does perform a miracle, although the Nazareth crowd doesn’t perceive it: He walks through the crowd and keeps on walking. Jesus will submit to death in order to conquer it for us, but now is not the time. Good Friday (and Easter) will happen at a time appointed by God and not a moment earlier or a moment later than God has decided. The God revealed in Jesus will have the final Word. Jesus the Word then, reveals two important truths to us today.
The first is that He has come to set you free from sin and death and that when you trust that Gospel Word, you are free. Right this moment. Eternity with God starts when we believe this Word, no matter what we’ve done or what we’ve been. That's the Gospel and it's for you, friends!
The second thing is that the free gift of His salvation comes by way of the cross.
It comes by Jesus’ cross. The Messiah will be rejected by the world, even by His own people, so that Jesus can save those who believe. His rejection at Nazareth foreshadows His impending rejection at Jerusalem.
There’s another cross: ours. Jesus will later say, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." (Luke 9:23) We bear our cross as, in response to Jesus’ word, we set aside our pride and daily confess our need of Jesus, Who gives us the riches of His grace, freedom from our sin, eyes to see the love God bears for us always, and freedom from sin, death, and the devil.
Once more this morning, Jesus comes to us in His gracious, Gospel Word and, in Word-inspired faith we can now say, “Today, God’s salvation has been accomploshed in our hearing.” This is the power of His Word for us. May God help us daily to receive Jesus and His Word. Amen
Here is both the video of today's second worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio and the text of the message. Have a good and blessed week.
This past week, Ann and I welcomed a high school classmate and her husband, whose wedding I did thirty-three years ago, to our house for dinner. It was so much fun! During the course of our time together, we prayed and our friend talked about things she is praying for in her quiet time. We reminisced and talked about our challenges. And we laughed and laughed. I found myself unable to sleep that night because I was so excited just thinking about all the four of us had shared. Do you ever have times like this, moments filled with so much meaning and joy that you can’t catalog it all?
These sorts of moments, I think, are gifts from God meant to sustain us in His love, joy, and grace.
All of this brings us to the subject of our Gospel lesson for this Second Sunday after Epiphany, John 2:1-11. I’m sure that if I’d been one of the disciples with Jesus on the day our lesson recounts, I would have had an even harder time sleeping that night than I did this past Thursday! There is so much in Jesus’ first recorded miracle, turning water into wine, that we could never catalog all the love, joy, and grace to be seen here. In fact, as I was preparing this message this past week, I began by listing about twelve different things I could talk about. Today though, I want to focus on two basic things revealed to us in this encounter with Jesus.
You know what happens. There’s a wedding in Cana, a village not far from Nazareth, where Jesus grew up. It’s been one week since Jesus began His ministry and three days since He and the disciples left the Jordan to arrive here. Wedding celebrations last a week in these times and the festivities have just begun when a crisis happens. Jesus’ mother thinks Jesus should do something about it. “They have no more wine,” she says. (John 2:3) It’s probable that the mother of our Lord wants Jesus to save the wedding hosts from embarrassment. But this crisis is more than a socially embarrassing situation bringing the potential for community ridicule and scorn. It points us to a simple fact: Nothing in this life is guaranteed, permanent, perfect, or utterly reliable.
Wine runs out.
Good health fades.
Relationships fray.
Life ends.
And, as to our supply of righteousness–a sinlessness that would make us worthy of life with God, we are completely lacking, totally unworthy of salvation.
David, described by the Bible as a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22), who also committed adultery and murder, confesses: “I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” (Psalm 51:5)
Friends, we are all lacking.
In our own power, we lack the certainty that we will be alive this afternoon, let alone in the tomorrows we so carefully plan.
In our own power, we lack the righteousness needed to have a life with God or a place in His Kingdom.
Paraphrasing Jesus’ mother, we can say honestly about our existences and prospects, “We have no more wine. We have nothing!”
Without the God revealed in Jesus Christ, our lives can only be exercises in meaninglessness and futility. Jesus responds to His mother, asking her what their hosts’ dilemma has to do with the two of them, and reminding her, “My hour has not yet come.” (John 2:4) Jesus’ “hour,” according to the Gospel of John, is the time of His glorification, which includes His death, resurrection, and ascension.
Jesus is reminding her that God acts on His timetable, not ours.
While Jesus would later reveal Himself to be “I AM,” Yahweh, the God of all creation, the time for such disclosure to the world at large had not yet come, and not even His earthly mother could change that. But Jesus does hear our requests of Him, our prayers in His name, and He has compassion for all His children.
When our conditions of lack, of helplessness and need, are brought before Him, He doesn’t walk away.
When we acknowledge our sins, He doesn’t hide His face!
You know what happens next. Jesus, without a word beyond telling the servants to fill the large stone purification jars with water, calls no attention to the miracle–the sign of His lordship–that He performs, turning water into wine. Only those who already in some way believed in Him–His mother and His disciples–have a clue as to what has just happened. (John 1:29) The steward of the party and the others think that it’s either a fortuitous circumstance or good planning that the groom has saved the best wine for last. That’s often how an unbelieving world views the ways in which Jesus meets our helplessness with His help.
When I had the so-called “widowmaker” heart attack twelve years ago, my cardiologist told me the day I received a stent, “Because you had none of the risk factors, I can’t explain why you had the heart attack you did. I also can’t explain why you survived.” When I shared that with an unbelieving friend, he told me, “Well, I’m sure that there’s a medical explanation.” “Sure,” I told him, “my cardiologist is top-notch. He can explain what happened to me. But he was telling me that he couldn’t explain why it happened.” My attending nurse, looking at the miracle of my survival through the eyes of faith, had as good an explanation for my survival as I’ve heard: “God has other plans for you.” At the end of today’s Gospel lesson, John tells us, “What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” (John 2:11)
What was it about turning water into wine that made the disciples believe all the more that Jesus was the Messiah? Consider the visions of fruitfulness, plenty, and life that the Old Testament prophets, hundreds of years before, said would come when the Messiah brought the Kingdom of God into being.
Joel 3:18-19 says: “In that day the mountains will drip new wine...”
And God says through the prophet Amos, “‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman and the planter by the one treading grapes. New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from all the hills…” (Amos 9:13)
And, beyond the prophets, in the period between the Old and New Testaments, a time of despair and spiritual emptiness, one of the rabbis wrote with precision about the miracle at Cana: “And it shall come to pass…that the Anointed One shall then begin to be revealed…each branch shall produce a thousand clusters, and each cluster produce a thousand grapes and each grape produce 120 gallons of wine,” precisely the amount of wine Jesus made from water in our lesson. (2 Baruch 29:3, 5-6, Apocrypha) Jesus is the Messiah Who offers up His body and His blood, Who, for those who believe in Him, replaces the old bitterness of sin, death, and futility with the new wine of life, fullness, plenty, and eternal reconciliation with God. Jesus says, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10) By God’s grace through faith in Jesus, our unrighteousness is replaced with Jesus’ righteousness, our death is replaced with Jesus’ life, our grief is supplanted by His resurrection joy. Life in this world is hard. But we who are born captives to sin and death can see in the One Who turned water into wine and has already finished His work of saving us and granting eternity to all who turn to Him in faith, hope.
Suffering, death, decrepitude, sorrow, and spiritual poverty need not be the final word over a human life.
Already, we have seen the epiphanies revealing Christ’s identity as God the Son and our Savior.
Already at Cana, we can faintly hear in the distance the cry believers will hear on that Resurrection morning when all the dead in Christ will be called from their graves as God and His angels shout: “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” (Ephesians 5:14)
This is our joy and the joy we are privileged to share with all the world! Amen
From the moment a child is born, speculation begins. Who does she look like? What will he become? In a way, we’re all born as mysteries and our whole lives unscramble and reveal who we are.
The Epiphany season of the Church Year, which began three days ago, is a time in which our Gospel lessons show us the unfolding of an even greater mystery than our personal identities and destinies. They focus on events in which Jesus, the baby born in Bethlehem, is revealed as our Savior, God’s anointed King, God the Son.
Today’s Gospel lesson recounts one of those events, Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River. At the beginning of our lesson, we’re told that some people thought that John might be the Messiah. But John says it’s not him, that they need to look for someone else. “I baptize you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” (Luke 3:16-17)
Shortly after that, people got their first glimpse of the Messiah. Luke says, “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying,heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’”
As we consider Jesus at the Jordan with John the Baptist, how is our picture of Jesus clarified? I can see Jesus being revealed to us in at least three ways.
First, we see Jesus revealed as the Messiah, the Christ. God was good for His ancient promises. God did send an Anointed One, as God had promised He would through the Old Testament prophets. And this Messiah, just as God had promised, would overcome our sin by suffering and dying for us and then rising to allow us to live forever with God. That means, quite simply, that there is, as you’ve heard me say before, nothing we can do and nothing we must do to make ourselves right to be part of God’s kingdom. Jesus, the Messiah, the Christ has already done it all!
So, when we hear Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” we need not shudder in fear. It’s true that we are sinners who fall short of God’s intentions for us and it’s true that perfect righteousness is required for anyone to enter into God’s eternal kingdom. But it is equally true that Jesus Christ, through His death and resurrection, covers all who believe in Him with His perfection and righteousness.
God’s Law, Scripture teaches us, only makes us aware that we are sinners worthy of eternal condemnation. (Romans 3:20) That's all the Law can do. So, if you set out to make yourself righteous by being a good person or doing good things, in the end, you’ll still be what you were at the moment of your conception, a sinner dead in your sinful nature. “But now apart from the law,” the Bible tells us, “ the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” (Romans 3:21-22) The first epiphany we see at Jesus’ baptism then is that, despite our sin, God has made good on His promise to rescue us. He has given His very own Son to make us right, reconciled with Him. Through the gift of faith in Jesus Christ, Jesus, Who took His sin into His own body and bore our condemnation for it, gives us His righteousness.
In Jesus’ baptism, we also see that He is the Messiah Who will baptize believers with the Holy Spirit and fire. John had said that while he was offering the people of his day a preparatory baptism of repentance, the Messiah would give a greater baptism.
John’s baptism was something that people did, deciding to be baptized as a sign of their own repentance while waiting for the Messiah to be revealed.
But Jesus’ baptism is an action of God by which, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God claims us as His own, crucifies our old selves, and raises our new selves with Jesus.
Heaven opens to the baptized and the Holy Spirit is unleashed in them to daily call them to faith in Jesus.
Baptism is one more expression of God’s Word in which He reminds us that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life and that no one is reconciled to the Father without faith in Jesus. (John 14:6; Acts 4:12)
When God the Father said of Jesus, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased,” He was affirming that Jesus was the Messiah who would bring this greater baptism, Holy Baptism, one of the Sacraments of Christ’s Church. The Spirit is the tenacious Fire of God Who calls us to repentance and faith in Jesus and enlightens and purifies us as we trust in Him!
A third thing revealed in Jesus at His baptism is that in Him, heaven is openedto us. Heaven opened, Luke tells us, as Jesus was praying.
This is why Jesus tells us to pray in His name. This means acknowledging that we only dare approach God the Father because of what Jesus has done for us through His crucifixion and resurrection. “This is the confidence we have in approaching God,” we’re told in 1 John 5:14, “that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” And if any of our praying reflects, as it inevitably will, our selfishness and sinful natures, praying in Jesus’ name will mean that God will forge our characters and reframe our prayers in light of His good will. This is why Jesus teaches us to pray, “Thy will be done.”
By the sacrifice of His body and blood at Calvary, Jesus tears open heaven for us: we receive forgiveness and eternal life, the certainty of His eternal promises, and the privilege of being in communion with the God Who made and loves us.
The opening of heaven to believers in Jesus goes by way of the cross, of course, and it’s a two-way street. Not only do those baptized in Christ have access to heaven, heaven also has access to us.
God will use that opening to reshape us in the image of Christ, crucifying our old sinful selves so that
our new selves can rise with Jesus. But, no matter how hard any of this is–it’s tough to yield control of our lives over to God when we think we know what’s best, we know that God will be with us always.
Listen, folks: Jesus tenaciously loved the unbelieving Thomas, the knuckleheaded Peter, the murderous Paul; Jesus won’t give up on anyone to whom He has opened up heaven! Not you. Not me.
Our call is to simply turn to Him, day in and day out. With the apostle Paul, we know that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In Jesus, the promise of God to ancient Israel is true for all people: “Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.” (Isaiah 45:22)
“Prayer is not about getting what we want,” says Brian Blount, a professor of New Testament at Princeton University, “or even what we oftentimes are sure is right for us and those around us; prayer is about unleashing the frightening, unstable, uncontrollable power of God.” That actually describes the entire life of the Christian to whom Jesus opens heaven! Heaven is opened to us so that the uncontrollable power of God that not even sin or death can stay is unleashed in our lives!
In the Epiphany season, we’re reminded again of how Jesus is, in the words of the Christmas hymn, “our Emmanuel,” the Child, the Savior, the King Who is “God with us.” And at this very moment, He is God with you. Amen
