Category: Epiphany Sermons

Text: Mark 1:40-45
Date: Epiphany VI + 02/15/09
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

“If you will.” “If you will,” said the leper who came to Jesus, kneeling before Him, “If you will, you can make me clean.” Now does that sound like faith? It may sound like at least a little faith.

Jesus was known to more and more people as a holy man who could and would heal people and even cast out demons. So this man comes to Jesus. He doesn’t call Him “Lord” or even “Sir.” He doesn’t prostrate himself or worship Him but merely politely kneels. The first word out of his mouth is not a word of faith but of doubt. The first word out of his mouth is like that from the latest Met Life commercials seeking some sort of assurance or insurance “for the ifs in life.” “If.” “If you will.” “If it is somehow within your purpose or desire, Jesus, you can, you are able to heal me, to make me clean.” His first words question more than know and believe the will and purpose of Jesus’ presence and ministry. It is possible, the man supposes, that it is somehow NOT within Jesus’ will, purpose or desire (though He has healed and cleansed many) to heal and cleanse this particular leper. So, I guess, in a supposed at least halfway humility he allows for the possibility that Jesus just may reject him and his request. “If.” “If you will, you can make me clean.” Continue reading “If”

Text: Mark 1:29-39
Date: Epiphany V + 2/8/09
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

I was going to have an object lesson this morning. I was going to place this reading desk over on the left side of the altar from your perspective. Then I was simply going to begin the sermon wondering and complaining that something was just not right. Then I began to think of all the churches I can remember being in, picturing in my mind on which side of the chancel the pulpit was located. If your experience is like mine, almost all the churches I can think of have the pulpit on the right side (Grace English, Chicago; St. Paul’s, Wood River; Trinity, Jackson; St. Mark’s, West Bloomfield; Zion, Detroit; Valparaiso University Chapel; Kramer Chapel, Ft. Wayne; Mt. Olive, Minneapolis; St. Lorenz, Frankenmuth; and we could go on and on). But there are a few with the pulpit on the left side (Immanuel, Rock Island, IL.; St. John’s, Taylor, MI; the Chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis). Like so many details of church history and architecture, my brief survey suggested there is no tradition or “right and wrong” of the “right or left” controversy as far as the placement of the pulpit goes. The only point was how we tend to be reluctant to change. We prefer the familiar, the predictable. And when something’s different, it throws us, at least for a moment.

Introducing Jesus to his readers in the first chapter of Mark’s gospel, the Evangelist doesn’t wait very long for you to figure out that Jesus is a powerful preacher and an amazing healer of people with various diseases and even casting out demons, before he throws you a curve, something unpredictable: “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found him and said to him, ‘Everyone is looking for you.’” Their concern seemed to be that Jesus was not acting in accordance with everyone’s expectations. Continue reading “Unpredictable”

Text: Mark 1:21-28
Date: Epiphany IV + 2/1/09
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

Okay. Let’s get this out of the way, right off the bat. Today is the Sunday we’ve all been waiting for. It’s been called the game with the largest television audience of any other broadcast sport. The players appear to be healthy and in shape for the challenge. The weather is cooperating. And I’m ready to make my prediction. I’m sure that, by now, you all have figured out that I’m referring to . . . “the Greatest Show on Grass,” the FBR (Phoenix) Open at the TPC of Scottsdale, Arizona! What? What football game? Anyway, Scottsdale, sunny and 74 is better than Tampa Bay, mostly sunny and 69, and certainly better than here, cloudy and 32.

On a higher plain, however, this Sunday gets to the dramatic action of the story of Christ we’ve been waiting for. So far He has been born as a baby, passively received baptism by John and quietly called certain men to follow Him. Today he astonishes people with his teaching and casts out a screaming demon from a man. Continue reading “Come, O Christ, and Reign Among Us”

Text: Mark 1:14-20
Date: Epiphany III + 1/25/09
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

Today’s Gospel declares that there are two types of divine call from God. The first is the universal invitation to salvation as when our Lord Jesus Christ came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” The second sort of divine call is the individual summons of certain men to the service of the apostolic ministry as when He personally called Philip and Nathanael as we heard last week, and today as we have the calling of Simon and Andrew, James and John saying, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” I emphasize that these are two separate sorts of calls because in homogenizing them or combining them we confuse both the office of the ministry and the priesthood of all believers. Continue reading “Listen! God is Calling”

Text: John 1:43-51
Date: Epiphany II + 1/18/09
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

In these first few Sundays of the Epiphany season we are told of Jesus’ calling of his disciples or apostles—today Philip and Nathanael, next Sunday Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John—the final total to be twelve in all. In these words we are to see and understand the fact that today Christ has called us, and still calls all, to follow him and, as with his first disciples, to know what that call means. In the context of John’s Gospel he makes it clear that to be called to follow Jesus means to be changed, transformed, named and claimed by Christ and made to be part of his new creation. Today we hear that when Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, he said, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” This puzzled Nathanael at first. But as we shall see, it is because Jesus himself is The True Israelite that all who come to him are given a new life and identity and destiny in him. Continue reading “The True Israelite”

Text: Mark 1:4-11
Date: Baptism of Our Lord + Epiphany I + 1/11/09

Once again, in a matter of only four weeks or so, we hear of John the Baptist preaching and baptizing in the wilderness area of the Jordan River. Of course, this time it is for the purpose of telling of the beginning of our Lord’s active earthly ministry that begins with His baptism. Before we speak of Jesus’ baptism, however, let us listen again to the Baptist and consider the significance of his baptism. Continue reading “The Baptism of Jesus”

Text: Luke 18:31-43
Date: Quinquagesima Sunday + 2/18/07

      On the Sunday before we enter into the holy season of Lent we hear one of our Lord’s predictions of what’s coming. He prepared and told his disciples numerous times what lay before him and before them. “We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.” We expect to hear these words because we know what’s coming. We’ve been there. We know the rest of the story.

     How different for the first disciples who, St. Luke emphasizes, “understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said.” They didn’t think that what he was saying would literally come true. After all they had been through, every time Jesus’ enemies or critics tried to trip him up or trap him or even to do harm to him Jesus would stump them with his wisdom or just walk away unscathed. No one had been able to lay a hand on him. Maybe they thought he was speaking in a parable again. Yeah, that’s it, “The parable of the suffering servant”! For, even if “the Gentiles,” that is, the Roman occupiers would confront him, it would prove fruitless, maybe, as he said, for only “three days,” and then King Jesus would take over, mount his throne, expel the foreigners and set up his glorious kingdom. That’s how we would have written the script. But, we know he meant that he’d really be mocked and spit upon, flogged and killed. We know that his innocent suffering and death would be real and that his kingdom would be, as he said, “not of this world,” something to be “seen” and believed by faith. …Or do we even really know that?
Continue reading “The Cry of Faith”

Text: Luke 8:4-15
Date: Sexagesima + 2/11/07

     Jesus’ parable of the seed and the various types of soil in part answers the question of the mystery, “Why do not all people believe?” and “Why are not all people saved?” It answers in part why certain people reject the Christian Gospel as being irrelevant to their lives while others embrace it as the most essential thing that alone, more than anything else, gives meaning and purpose to their lives. For it treats of the spiritual battle between God’s universal, loving plan of salvation on the one hand and mankind’s slavery to sin on the other. In fact it is precisely because of mankind’s common spiritual blindness that Jesus spoke so much of the time in parables. For at once parables attract at least curiosity and gain our attention. Yet the key to understanding Jesus’ parables is a power or attitude beyond our own intellect or natural abilities. On the one hand the Bible delivers to us what we are to believe about God and about the world. On the other hand it is only when God gives and works this thing called faith in the heart that a person is enabled to believe. But this still doesn’t answer the question as to why some believe and others do not. For either God is a capricious god in the giving of His gifts, not willing, as the Bible says, for “all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4), or there is something else going on here. Continue reading “Who Has Ears to Hear?”

Text: Matthew 20:1-16
Date: Septua-superbowl-gesima + 2/4/07

     It is fundamental to the Christian gospel that a person, a sinner, is justified in God’s sight not by works of righteousness of our own invention but by God’s grace alone for the sake of faith in Jesus Christ alone. Every Sunday school child, every catechumen, every Christian knows this. This is, as we say in our Lutheran Confessions, the doctrine upon which the Church either stands or falls. Forget this central teaching or mess it up or dress it up with all sorts of supposed “improvements” or academic “insights” and you will have lost it. You’d think such a simple, fundamental doctrine would be easy to maintain as central to everything else that goes on in the church and the world. But there’s the rub, and there’s the challenge Jesus addresses in today’s Gospel with the parable of the workers in the vineyard: the fact that Christians, in this life, live in two kingdoms or realms at the same time, the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of heaven. It is one thing to clearly define the difference between these two kingdoms. It is another thing to resist confusing them. Continue reading “The Two Kingdoms”

Text: Matthew 17:1-9
Date: Transfiguration + 1/28/07

     When Jesus was transfigured before three of his disciples on the holy mountain they were aware that they were on holy ground, in a sacred space. When they heard the voice from the cloud, they fell on their faces and were terrified. That ought to be the first reaction any time sinners are confronted with the holy God. Recall Adam after the fall into sin hiding in the bushes when he heard the voice of God (Gen. 3:8), Moses hiding his face in fear before the burning bush (Ex. 3:6), Aaron and the people afraid to approach Moses when they saw his face shining after his conversation with God (Ex. 34:30), Isaiah’s cringing for fear in a corner of the temple when he saw God and heard the angel chorus (Is. 6:5), and Peter prostrating himself before Jesus after the miraculous catch of fish saying, “Depart from me [Lord], for I am a sinful man” [Luke 5:8]. This fear of God is good and right. It is the first word in Luther’s Small Catechism explaining the First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods.” “What does this mean?” “We should fear…God above all things.” For without the fear of God, first, you cannot then proceed to the next words, namely, not only to fear but also to “love and trust in God above all things.” Continue reading “Rise, and Have No Fear”