Category: Pentecost Sermons

Text: Matthew 21:33-46
Date: Pentecost XXI (Proper 22) + 10/5/08
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

According to the Word of God we believe, teach and confess that each and every person is created by God. Oh, we know the human biological processes involved, and we cannot prove that there is some divine marker or evidence of God’s involvement. It is only because God Himself claims to be Creator that people who listen to God’s Word believe Him and claim that every individual, even those who deny it, or think it is somehow a matter of our “choice,” are, nevertheless, created by God.

Apart from God life can quickly be viewed as meaningless, a matter of chance or of only what you make it to be. But as soon as a person realizes God’s creative involvement, then comes the great question, “Why has God created me?” What is God’s purpose? What has God created you to be? And here we might think about vocation or our station in life whether that be as a child or a parent, a mother or father, a worker, a public servant, a physician, a musician…whatever. But underlying your vocation or station or situation in life is each and every person being a reflection of the glory of God. And so, regardless of our differences, every person is to reflect that relationship, as the catechism says it, of fear, love and trust in God above all things. Continue reading “What I Was Meant to Be”

Text: Matthew 21:23-32
Date: Pentecost XX (Proper 21) + 9/28/08
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

This Gospel today couldn’t have happened at a better time when candidates are bending and twisting their words in order to lure the larger vote totals in their favor in the up coming elections. Moistening the finger and checking which way the winds of political opinion polls are blowing is not the invention of twenty-first century or even American society. This parable, spoken in the Jerusalem temple in the very Holy Week when Jesus would be crucified, spoken to those who would turn the tide of popular opinion in a few short days from “Hosanna” to “Crucify Him” appears on the surface to speak of only two responses to God’s offer of salvation, either one of saving faith of of damning rejection of Jesus. But, as we shall see, there are two other unspoken responses possible. Continue reading “According to the Latest Poll….”

Text: Matthew 20:1-16
Date: Pentecost XIX (Proper 18) + St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist Day + 9/21/08
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

Peace be to you and grace from Him who freed us from our sins.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.

As a preacher myself, I don’t get to hear a lot of other preaching as you would probably guess. And when a preacher does get to sit and listen to a sermon preached by someone else, you can imagine the temptation to criticize the sermon along the way (I wonder where he’s going with that, I would have said such and such, I would have said it this way or that, I wouldn’t have said that at all). Preachers need to learn how to listen to sermons just like everyone else—as a workshop of the Holy Spirit working through and in and around the particular words preached to speak to people in His own way.

Last week I got to listen to a sermon on videotape. The preacher was filling in for someone else and I don’t know his name. It was Father’s Day. So the sermon, based, I think, in the Old Testament reading for the day, was basically God’s design and advice for how to be a good father. The further the sermon went, however, I became increasingly disturbed because I began to lose hope that he was actually going to get around to preaching the gospel. As practical, helpful and understandable as it was, he never did preach the gospel. As close as he got was God as the example of fatherhood. I even began to feel a little guilty that I’ve never preached a sermon as practical and as helpful as that. But that’s because I’ve always and still believe that I am called to preach the gospel. The gospel is not just good advice or models of virtue given for us to imitate. The gospel is the word given only for people who have and admit that they have screwed up, blown it, failed, who have sinned and lost, or nearly lost, all hope. Continue reading “That's Not Fair!”

Text: Matthew 18:21-35
Date: Pentecost XVIII (Proper 19), Holy Cross + 9/14/08
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

Peace be to you and grace from Him who freed us from our sins. In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.

So central to the Christian faith is the forgiveness of sins that it is the one petition in the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus expands on in the Sermon on the Mount, saying, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt. 6:14-15). That strange statement is not to say that the forgiveness of your sins depends upon your forgiving others but rather that if you do not know how to forgive others it can be questioned whether you know or possess God’s forgiveness at all. Continue reading “Forgive and Forget?”

Text: Matthew 18:1-20
Date: Pentecost XVII (Proper 16) + 9/7/08
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

Peace be to you and grace from Him who freed us from our sins. In the name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Spirit.

The lectionary has us skip a chapter of Matthew’s Gospel because we celebrate and hear Matthew chapter 17 with its account of the Transfiguration of Our Lord on the last Sunday after the Epiphany each year just before entering the time of Lent. So the last thing we heard was the mighty confession of Peter upon which Jesus said He would build His Church, and then Jesus’ prediction of His coming suffering, death and resurrection, and the call and invitation for anyone who would be a Christian, who would “come after me,” as He said, to deny self, take up your cross and be following Him.

That coming after and following Jesus implies that He is leading us somewhere and that we are not there yet. The Christian life is a journey marked and experienced and recognized not by signs of accomplishment, glory, triumph or success but by the way of the Cross, of suffering, of faith, endurance and hope. It is, as Luther put it, an existence of “already, not yet.” The way of faith is a dangerous way because, all along the way, it is possible for you to fall away, to lose your place in the kingdom. Continue reading “Conversion”

“Lord Over Death” by “the late” Rev. Allen D. Lunneberg

Text: Matthew 16:21-26
Date: Pentecost XVI + 8/31/08

In Saint Matthew’s Gospel we have seen Jesus bringing His disciples along the way to faith in Him by means of His teaching and His miracles. With every step forward He was revealing to them (and to us), little by little, the depth and the fullness of who He is and what He came to accomplish. On the basis of His words and works, thus far, when asked straight out, “who do you say that I am?” Peter confessed, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16:16). It was a mighty confession of faith (and still is)—revealed to Peter (and to us) not by flesh and blood, that is, not by our puny mind’s logic or examination of the facts, but by the heavenly Father Himself, His Spirit working mightily through His Word. To call Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, is to acknowledge Him as God the Redeemer who has taken on our flesh and blood, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. To call Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, is to acknowledge that He came to usher in salvation in the Kingdom of God. To call Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, is to begin to understand the love of God for His world and everyone in it. But there’s more—because the salvation he came to bring us is for more than saving us from mere hunger as at the feeding of the 5,000, or from inclement weather as when He stilled the storm on the lake, or from sickness and suffering as with the daughter of the Canaanite woman, all of which is but the common lot of all in this sinful world. For, the love of God goes to the deepest recesses of our need. And that’s precisely the destination and destiny of the Christ, the Son of God. Continue reading “Lord Over Death”

Text: Matthew 16:13-20
Date: Pentecost XV (Proper 16) + 8/24/08
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

Peace be to you and grace from Him who freed us from our sins. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

In relating the words and acts of Jesus the Savior, St. Matthew organizes his Gospel with the purpose of telling people about Jesus in a way that they will be convinced, come to the conclusion and believe what St. Peter says in today’s Gospel, namely, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and in such faith and the confession thereof, be saved from death and hell by the forgiveness of sins and inherit eternal life. Matthew carefully arranges things in the beginning of his Gospel to demonstrate that Jesus is the promised Messiah because He perfectly fulfills everything written about Him in the Old Testament. He relates the words and teaching of Jesus to demonstrate how the Old Testament scriptures find their perfect, saving message fulfilled in Jesus. In addition he provides evidence of Jesus’ identity as the Son of God in the various miraculous works that witness to His divine nature—Jesus does what only God can do. Finally, then, this all leads to the most important part of the Gospel, namely, our Lord’s vicarious, sacrificial suffering and death on the cross and His glorious resurrection from the dead. We are approaching that most important, climactic section of Matthew’s Gospel where, in the very next verses of our text, Jesus begins to clearly tell His disciples of His coming suffering, death and resurrection. Continue reading “Good News, For All”

Text: Matthew 15:21-28
Date: Pentecost XIV + 8/17/08
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

In the hymn, “Beautiful Savior,” we sing of our Savior Jesus Christ calling him “Lord of the nations.” The scripture readings appointed for today all point to the universality of God’s plan of salvation; that God so loved the world; and that God’s plan was worked out in a particular way that can be known as he has communicated it through the inspired Prophetic and Apostolic Scriptures: namely, the covenant begun in Abraham, through the descendents of Israel, culminating in the promised Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. As God promised Abraham, “by your descendents will all the nations of the earth be blessed,” so Jesus concluded his earthly ministry with the command to make known this Good News and make disciples “of all nations.” This day we affirm again the Way, the Truth and the Life: Jesus who said, “no one comes to the Father but by me,” boldly testifying that “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

Now, that should come as a shock to no one. Yet, today we make that age-old affirmation in the face of a new situation. For, especially with today’s heightened awareness of the religion of Islam, and in the mix of a nation founded, in part, on the principle of freedom of religion and religious tolerance, that principle itself seems to have become a religion of sorts, one which will not tolerate the idea that any one religion is more or less true than any other. In other words, either all religions are true, at least to some extent (which is the false doctrine called universalism) or all religions are false (which attitude is called atheism). Continue reading “Lord of the Nations”

Text: Matthew 14:22-33
Date: Pentecost XIII + 8/10/08

The account of Jesus walking on the sea proclaims how God’s plan of salvation reaches its goal in Jesus. The Scriptures often describe salvation using water imagery, and even actual water as in the sacrament of Holy Baptism. In addition, this miracle with others like it serves to assure Christians that God has the power and the will also to protect and guard his people from all disaster. But while these words do address the Christian’s facing of life’s difficulties and troubles, there is an even more fundamental lesson here, and that is the identity and Person of who Jesus truly is and the vital importance for the true, saving faith to make that accurate identification and make sure He is the center of attention.

You’ve heard the phrase “like father, like son.” It used to be a more common thing that a man’s son would go into the same line of work as his father. It used to be more likely, for instance, that the sons of Lutheran pastors would become pastors themselves. Golf has plenty of father/son teams like Tiger and the late Earl Woods, Bob and David Duval, the Davis Loves and so on. Nascar has it’s own dynasties probably the most famous being Lee Petty, his son Richard, his son Kyle, and Richard’s grandson Adam. “Like father, like son” is even more essential when you talk of British royalty as the son and grandsons of Queen Elizabeth are in line to become King someday. Even among American Presidents, John Quincy Adams (1825-29) was the first son of a President, John Adams (1797-1801), to become President. And, of course, our current President George W. Bush (“Bush 43”) is the son of his father George H. W. Bush (“Bush 41”).

“Like father, like son.” This is the underlying principle in this section of Matthew’s Gospel as today’s reading concludes with all the disciples in the boat worshipping Jesus, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” Continue reading “Like Father, Like Son”

Text: Matthew 14:13-21
Date: Pentecost XII (Proper 13) + 8/3/08
Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, Rochester Hills, MI

Martin Luther commends the use of Psalm 145:15-16 to begin asking a blessing before meals:

“The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food in due season.
You open your hand;
you satisfy the desire of every living thing.”

It is a wonderful prayer most of all because it reminds you that, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, life is “more than food, and the body more than clothing” (Mt. 6:25). For the psalm says God does more than merely satisfy physical hunger, but “you satisfy the desire of every living thing.” This is why the Lord’s feeding of the 5,000 in the wilderness was so memorable—not just because of the miracle itself, but because of what it said about Jesus, who He is and what He came to do which is more than to provide food for the tummy, but to satisfy the deepest desire of every living thing; the desire for life not threatened by death, the taking away of the fear of death, the desire for reconciliation with God.

The first desire spoken about in today’s Gospel, however, is not ours but God’s. God desires that all should come to the knowledge of the truth and be saved (1 Tim. 2:4). God desires not “the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11). So, as of first importance, our text reports that when Jesus heard of the murder of John the Baptist, this was a sign and reminder of His own destiny and goal, the giving of His life into death on a cross so that all might be reconciled to God, freed from sin’s slavery, raised to new, eternal life. As much as His human nature recoiled at the horrible thought, this was His ultimate goal and desire—to offer Himself as the one-and-only pure and perfect sacrifice for the sin of the world. So now He withdraws from His more public posture of preaching, teaching and healing. He heads “to a desolate place by Himself.” Continue reading “Satisfied”