December 6, 2023 – Advent         Text:  Galatians 5:22-23

Dear Friends in Christ,

Have you made your lists for your relatives?  I still write mine on a piece of paper but then Toni has to transfer it to a spreadsheet or Google doc put together by a brother or a niece.  Do you feel the way I do that it gets harder and harder to come up with things on your list?  I already have clothes in four different closets at home, Spotify so no CD’s needed, and most of the sports equipment I need, though golf balls are always accepted.  Cologne and Page-A-Day calendars are always winners, but I have to think outside the box.  Ah, going to Germany next year so there are some ideas.  Would like a lava lamp, always enjoyed those.  Should I add bell bottom jeans, a headband, and doorway beads?  Far out dude!

What goes on your list?  What should be on our list?  Our text for tonight is a good beginning.  It is a list that tells of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Our theme this year for Advent is “Gifts”, and it has to start with a list.  So, let’s do that . . .

“GIFT GIVING LISTS”

I don’t know if you have every broken down this list into the threes, but it fits quite nicely.  The first three gifts on the list are love, joy, peace.  These all come directly from God.  He is love.  God loved the world, understood all its depravity and purposed to remove it.  He sent His Son Jesus to cleanse it.   

With this love goes joy.  “Joy to the world, the Savior comes, the Savior promised long.”  Enduring joy should be bubbling up in our heart from all the grace of God in our possession.  It is a joy undimmed by tribulation.  This joy ever beams for the believer and merges into the joy of heaven.

Peace is the quietness of the soul, the opposite of dread and terror.  The feeling of all who walk in the Spirit of God.  We have peace between ourselves and God because of the gracious work of Christ.

The second trio is composed of gifts that appear in our contact with men and women.

Patience.  A good word for this time of year.  Children wait patiently for gifts.  We wait patiently in lines.  Headphones while waiting in lines do wonders.  Take yourself away with Christmas songs, hymns or your favorite tunes until you hear, “Can I help the next in line!”

  Our world can always use our kindness.  In our being kind to one another it benefits our society.  

Goodness is not our moral excellence, but as goodness doing good to others.  Instead of a self-indulgent life how can we share goodness with those God has called into our sphere of influence?  

Faithfulness could go with these last three in this sense.  Can men and women trust us?  Will we make a faithful commitment?  Do others see you as someone they can count on?  But because of its active nature in the original Greek language, it is better positioned to think of it as something God gives to us.  We receive the faith which in turn leads to our faithfulness when it comes to God’s Word and his will.  

Our gentleness helps when a calm voice is needed.  Maybe that will be yours at your Christmas gathering.  It comes through in how you speak to little ones and your spouse.

Self-control brings up the caboose in our list.  This is one where I think most of us have one area where this is a struggle.  We make a list in our head where self-control is always there, but then there’s that one thorn in flesh that gets us every time.  “Lord, I want to do better.”  May the Holy Spirit help us in that endeavor.

In my Christmas Eve gatherings with my extended family when I was a child the list of gift openers was really long.  We opened one person at a time.  Kids first by age, grandma, and then my aunts and uncles by age and finally my mom and dad.  Doug Lueck might sit there for three hours or more to get to his gifts.  Who was paying attention?  Certainly not the kids or the uncles setting up the kid’s toys.  For all of us gathered around the Christmas tree these gifts of the Spirit were on display.  It was a spectacle of wrapping paper and my mom explaining every gift she got for somebody.  But what joy it was.  It is hard to replicate that memory.

We don’t have to.  The Lord remembers us.  We made his list before the creation of the world.  We wait in patience for that ultimate gift home.  The Lord has explained His saving act in the pages of Scripture.   Naughty or nice, it doesn’t matter.  Forgiven and redeemed through no merit of our own, that matters.  Making the list?  You are on it.  Thanks be to God whose gift we possess.

Amen.      

November 26, 2023             Text:  1 Corinthians 15:20-28

Dear Friends in Christ,

The concentration camp at Dachau was liberated on a Sunday in April 1945.  One week later, Greek and Serbian Orthodox prisoners celebrated Easter in the camp barracks.  Priests wore makeshift vestments over their blue and white striped prison uniforms.  They sang the liturgy, read the Scriptures, and even recited a sermon by St. John Chrysostom – all without texts, all by memory.  During the long years of suffering and anguish, these prisoners had never forgotten Christ’s resurrection victory over death and that it also set them free from death.  Whatever was happening in their lives, they always knew that Easter meant something was still coming for them.  Today, a Russian Orthodox chapel at the Dachau Memorial houses an icon of the resurrected Christ leading the prisoners out of the camp gates.  

Every Sunday is a celebration of Easter, of Christ’s glorious victory over sin and death for us.  But today, the Last Sunday of the Church YearI, is especially so, because the Last Sunday, pointing us to the Last Day, shows us where Easter is headed.  What do I mean?

“WHERE IS EASTER HEADED?”

Easter brought forth the firstfruits.  Jesus raised to life again.  Yes, Jesus died on the cross, but his resurrection is an accomplished fact.  What good news.  But where is it headed?  In the Old Testament Israel would offer the first gathering of wheat as a sacrifice to God.  Still, they knew an entire harvest was still to come.  The firstfruits were just the first of many fruits.

In the same way, Jesus’ resurrection will inevitably lead to the resurrection of all flesh.  “In Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” (v. 22). That’s Last Day, Judgment Day, the focus of this Sunday.  All people will be gathered before Christ, the believers through Christ will have bodies raised, reunited with their souls, the resurrection of all flesh.  What a day that will be for those, Paul says, “who belong to Christ.”

Christ was one of us.  Walked in the way of human beings.  The ancient Greek writer Callimachus once composed an epigram in which he commented:  “Being a thief myself, I know the tracks of a thief.”  Being a man himself, Jesus knew the tracks of a man.  He knew work and rest.  He experienced joys and sorrows.  He understood that we humans have a problem with sin, and we can’t solve it.  He knew sin would destroy humanity.  So, He took the destruction on Himself.  He knew the tracks of man led to death, and Jesus did, in fact, die.  But being the Son of God, His tracks did not end in death, but rather out of the tomb to life again.  He was raised up, and all those who belong to Him will also walk in tracks leading to eternal life.  

Our resurrection to life will mean that death and all its allies are destroyed under Jesus’ feet.  Death couldn’t hold Christ.  Death cannot hold us.  If death has no power, then on the Last Day, all enemies will be defeated.

Christ has defeated sin.  Christ has defeated the devil and his demonic forces.  The evil forces of the world are no more with the return of Jesus.  We have nothing to fear.

But some do.  Judgment will be horrible for those on the outside of the faith.  An eternal fire prepared for Christ’s enemies.  Their deeds will not save them.  Their accomplishments mean nothing.  They stand condemned.

For those of us belonging to Christ, death is defeated.  Death is the last fruits of sin.  Christ, the firstfruits of life, changes the end of the story.  Is that where this is headed?  Almost.

Finally, even Christ will be subjected to the Father.  For Christ, the mission will be accomplished.  Every need of God’s people in a fallen world met.  Every enemy conquered.  Christ will lay it all at His Father’s feet.  Then things will once again be like they were at the beginning.  God will be “all in all.”  Will we need food, clothing, shelter?  No, we will have God.  Will we need love, comfort, relationships?  No, we will have God.  Will we need protection and deliverance?  No, we will have God.  Verse 24, “Then comes the end, when (Christ) delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power.”  

This is where Easter has been headed.  On this Last Sunday of the Church Year, a blessed fulfillment of Easter to you!

Amen.    

November 22, 2023 – Thanksgiving Eve         Text:  John 1:1-5

Dear Friends in Christ,

Well, here we are on a not liturgically required holiday.  Some would say this service is non-essential.  Some denominations don’t worship on Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving Eve or they may participate in joint worship led by members of the local clergy association.  

The holiday was initiated by Abraham Lincoln during the dark days of the Civil War, so the day has this religious significance:  God is worthy of thanks even in bad times.  Every LCMS church I have ever been associated with has had a Thanksgiving Day or Thanksgiving Eve Worship service.  But we still ask the question . . .

“THANKSGIVING DAY CHURCH SERVICES:  ARE THEY REALLY NECESSARY?”

For the sake of religious freedom, the Pilgrims fled England first for Holland and then for American with a brief stopover back in England.  They landed on Cape Cod in 1620, and the following years the survivors of the brutal winter had a feast with the Native Americans to give thanks to God.  Here are the roots of our national holiday.

In the Old Testament, certain days were set apart for thanking God.  In the New Testament the word eucharist, a word sometimes used for the service of Holy Communion, means “thanksgiving” and specifically thanksgiving to God.  Do you realize how many times we “give thanks to God?”  Look at our liturgy.  At the end of a Scripture reading the elder or Pastor says, “This is the Word of the Lord.”  We Lutherans know the automatic response, “Thanks be to God.”  Let’s try another one, Pastor says, “Bless we the Lord.”  Congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.”  Thanking God is part of our religious fiber.  Crazy right, but thanking God comes close to believing in Him!

Just because people may gather around a table and give thanks for something doesn’t make it a religious awakening.  We should be thanking the Giver not the gift.  Calling it “turkey Day” or “parade/football day” takes God out of the equation.  Even though He might like a huge blown-up Woody Woodpecker or tossing the pigskin in Detroit.  So, while a parade or football might keep people from worship, at least Santa Claus is at the end of the parade.  It makes a good transition into a season named for Christ, where many don’t want to speak His name in public celebrations.

Thanksgiving Day is more than a First Article matter.  We just don’t speak of God in generic terms.  We address Him as the Father of our Lord Jesus.  Look at our text, “All things were made through him – Jesus.” (v. 3.)  In our Epistle lesson it says this about Jesus.  “’I am the Alpha and the Omega ,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’”

The Pilgrims left England because King James I was telling them how to conduct their worship services.  Planning to sail to Virginia they ended up on the uninviting New England coast.  Within a year, half the Pilgrims had died.  If you have ever seen replicas of the Mayflower, one wonders how many times it might have crossed their minds that the religion of the king wasn’t all that bad.

Government has loosened the chains, but we were told how to worship during 2020.  People tell the Pilgrims of the day to get it line with same sex marriage, cancel culture, wokeism and why would you ever worship that God?

Are Thanksgiving services necessary?  Should we associate ourselves with the Pilgrims?  Well, let’s take a look at our own story of the Missouri Synod.  The Lutherans in Saxony and Prussia fled their countries to avoid religious persecution.  Refugees from the Saxon State Church came in five ships, only four made it to the port of New Orleans – one was lost at sea.  These Lutherans even prepared a document like the Mayflower Compact, which provided rules for their community in this adopted country.  Things did not go well in Missouri.  Some wanted to go back to Germany, just like some Pilgrims who returned to England.  Most stayed and found other Lutherans in American who believed like they did.  These are the forefathers and families who established the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

We give thanks to our Lord for bringing them to our shores.  We are a Christ-believing, Bible-believing, Confession-believing people because of what they did to get to America to establish the LCMS.  This is why we lift up our praise this day.  We have the freedom to say that Christ has paid the price for our terrible deeds.  We have the freedom to say that Christ has won our salvation as He overcame death and grave.  We have the freedom to say that as baptized men and women we are the children of God.  Thanks be to God!

Compare the Missouri Synod story to the Pilgrim story.  Change the language from English to German, add a few more ships and push the calendar ahead two centuries, and one story starts to resemble the other.  The characters have different names, lived at different times, and came from different places, but the plots are quite similar – they were fleeing religious persecution.  Persecution belongs to the Christian experience.  Read the Book of Acts.  Why then would Lutherans in America not celebrate Thanksgiving Day services?

Amen.