The Holy Gospel of our
Lord according to John:7: 37-39
On
the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the
Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”
Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those
who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given,
because Jesus was not yet glorified.
The Gospel of our Lord…
Grace
to you and peace from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Well,
we have a Birthday to Celebrate…Sing
with me…
Happy Birthday…Dear Church...Happy Birthday to You!
Yes, indeed, today is
the day we celebrate the Birthday of the Church – the day when the Church was
born and the day when the Holy Spirit was officially given to the Church. It is
a Feast Day of the Church, a day of true Celebration!
But to many in the
World, this is not such a happy day. Many secular folks look askance at the
Church. They see it as a man-made institution, begun by people who perpetrated
a huge fraud on the world because they were driven by the desire to deceive
people, to control them and to separate them from their money by any devious
means necessary.
They cite the recent
theft of $600,000 –one Sunday’s collections - from Joel Osteen’s Church in
Houston and are shocked by the annual budget that this represents.
They cite recent
scandals of sexual abuse by ministers of the church. They hearken back to the
Crusades as prima facie evidence of the Church’s malfeasance, and they criticize
hypocrisy by members of the church – all in an attempt to get us to shut up and
go away.
In short, it’s not the
greatest time in the world to be associated with the Church.
This is no big
surprise, Biblically speaking. Jesus told us that in this world, we WOULD have
tribulations (Jn. 16:33). He warned us that we would ….”be dragged before
governors and kings for [his]sake, to bear witness before them…” (Matthew
10:18,19; Luke 21:14).
And indeed, such
witnessing has been going on in various places around the world as long as the
Church has been in existence.
And at the current
time, In Sudan, a young Christian mother, Meriam Ibrihim, faces the sentence of death, merely
for BEING a Christian.
In Ireland recently, a
Christian pastor criticized Islam during a sermon and is now being called out by
the Authorities for the ‘crime’ of propagating Hate Speech.
We, in America, have been blessed with
relative peace in regard to the Authorities because our founding fathers wrote
into our Constitution the twin ideas of Freedom of Religion and Freedom of
Speech. But as of this week, Colorado officially became a Police State when a
Christian baker was court-ordered to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple and
give his staff comprehensive ‘re-education’ about the State’s
anti-discrimination laws.
( I understand he has
no intention of obeying this Orwellian directive and that his shop is now doing
quite well baking only brownies and cookies! ) We’re seeing the rise of hostility towards the church and increasing calls for Church men and women to shut up, go away or be prosecuted as hate-mongering, homophobic bigots.
Like I said, “Happy Birthday, Church!”
Well, things do look
bad in some ways for us as the Church – but my purpose today is not to lament
how awful things are, but to encourage us as the Church to understand who we
are, why we exist and to spur us on to works of love and Good works in the Name
of our Precious Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ.
Our Identity and
Mission:
In a prior message, I suggested
that we all face two basic problems. We must answer two basic questions about
ourselves:
1) Who am I? And, 2) What
should I do?
Let’s ask these basic
questions about ourselves as the Church, and remind ourselves of our Identity
and then think about How we should Act in the world. As a way of beginning, let’s think back over the last couple of weeks of our Sunday worship services. Last week, we had a very joyful occasion. What was it again? … Right! A Baptism! Kathleen Bonar was baptized into the family of God right here in our sanctuary!
And during Pastor
Rafe’s introduction, he cited Genesis 1:1,2: “In the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the
waters….”
This verse was
referenced because Baptism, in which a person is born into the family of God,
by the Spirit of God, mirrors the Creation of the world. God the Father spoke
the world into existence by his Word, the Logos, Jesus Christ (Jn1:1ff),
through the agency of His Spirit - literally, his ‘Breath” (Latin: Spiritu -
breath). All things that were created came into being through this cooperation
of the Trinity.
When it came to the
creation of mankind…”the Lord God formed the man
of dust from the ground and … breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life,
and the man became a living creature.” (Genesis 2:7)
This living creature
was created in the Image of God (Genesis 1:27) bearing the likeness of God in respect to the
ability to make real moral decisions for good or ill, the capacity to love
freely, and the ability to be like God, ‘creating’ things (though admittedly
not from nothing).
It’s like the story of
the scientists who got together and decided that man had come a long way and no
longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they
were done with Him.
The
scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer
need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous
things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."
God
listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done
talking, God said, "Very well, how about this, let's say we have a man
making contest." To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"
But
God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old
days with Adam."
The
scientist said, "Sure, no problem"… and bent down to grab himself a
handful of dirt.
God
just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"
Our Identity: So here is our Identity: We are created by God, in His image, through the agency of the Holy Spirit, for His own pleasure – using His own Rules! … Anybody who doesn’t like it has to get their own dirt!
The Church was born in
the same way God created Human beings – God sent His Spirit upon human beings,
and they became a Living Being– the Church, the very Body of Christ here on
earth.
Now, two Sundays ago,
Pastor Rafe also reminded us of what Luther’s Short Catechism says about the
work of the Holy Spirit. There was a brief
acronym. See if you can remember it.
C alls
G athers
E nlightens
S anctifies
P reservers (Keeps)
Here’s what the Small
Catechisim actually says about the Spirit. Let’s read it together.
"I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe
in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Ghost has called me by
the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true
faith; even as He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole
Christian Church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true
faith; in which Christian Church He forgives daily and richly all sins to me
and all believers, and at the last day will raise up me and all the dead, and
will give to me and to all believers in Christ everlasting life. This is most
certainly true."
Now, embedded in this
statement about the work of the Holy Spirit are some things for us, as the
Church, to do in order to fulfill the mandate that Jesus gave his disciples
before he left. Namely:
…
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
20 teaching them to observe all
that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:18-20)
In other words, we are
to Evangelize, to administer the Sacraments and to preach and teach the Word of
God, making disciples, not just converts.
We do this on the basis
of the Authority of the Risen Christ. “All authority in heaven
and on earth has been given to me,” says Jesus to his disciples, just before
sending them out (Mt. 28:18).
He
also comforts them with the statement “… behold, I am with you always, to the
end of the age” (Mt.28:20). How is He with us always – through the indwelling
presence of the Holy Spirit – that same Spirit that calls us to Himself,
gathers us together as the Church, enlightens us in the Truth of the Gospel,
sets us apart and makes us progressively more like him through Sanctification,
and keeps us in His love, preserving us for Himself until the day of His return
or our going home to him through death.
So
the role of the Church is to be the hands, feet and mouth of Christ in the
world, spreading the Good News and then tending those who come to Christ and become
his Church – the ‘called out’ ones.
To
the Church is given the authority to proclaim forgiveness of sins, and to
administer the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion. Those who say they can be
Good Christians without going to church miss these two vital, life-giving
ministries, which according to Dr. Luther, are the primary means by which the
Spirit works to convey the Grace of God.
When
we understand that the work of the Spirit comes to us through the ministry of
the Church, this prevents us from going off into a kind of extreme
individualism, in which I myself can claim that virtually anything is the ‘Work
of the Spirit.’
But,
you might say, doesn’t the Spirit give individual believers gifts?
Yes, indeed. First
Corinthians 12: 8-11: “For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of
wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts
of healing by the one Spirit, to another the
working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish
between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the
interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the
same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as
he wills.”
Why are these gifts
given? Verse 8 of the same chapter says: To each is given the manifestation of the
Spirit for the common good.”
This common good
includes empowerment witness and the gift of various ministries for the edification
or building up of the body of Christ, the Church. Ephesisans 4: 11- puts
it this way:
And
he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds
and teachers,
to equip the saints for the work of ministry,
for building up the body of Christ, until we
all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to
mature manhood,
to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and
fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning,
by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather,
speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the
head, into Christ, from whom the whole body,
joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each
part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in
love." (ESV)
And here, when the
Scripture speaks of the body being held together by every joint, we can remind
ourselves that our joints are held together by ligaments – strong bands of
fiber that connect muscle to bone.
Now the root of the
word ligament is the Latin LIGARE – ‘to bind fast” - which also happens to be
the same root for the word ReLIGion!
Those who say they are
‘spritual’ but not ‘religious’ don’t realize that it is the Spirit Himself that
gives the gifts, that ‘binds fast’ every joint, so that the body can be built
up in Love!
To insist that you can
be spiritual without being religious is to be a bag of flesh with no ligaments
to hold you together. Sort of like this blobfish:
The plain fact is that
there can be no true spirituality without spiritual practice – Religion - to express it!
To summarize then, we as
Christians understand our Identity:
We are Spirit-breathed People made in God’s
Image. And we understand our
Mission: We are to Make Disciples – by BEING the Church in the World.
And just as we cannot
save ourselves without God’s Spirit breathing life into us, neither can we
fulfill our ministry as the Church without the empowerment and assistance of
the Spirit. Therefore, we cry out to God’s Spirit to come and help us - to fill
us – or direct us. (Eph. 5:18)
I’m going to ask the
worship team to come now and lead us in a song by Mark Foreman that is really a prayer - A
prayer that the Holy Spirit come and exercise His ministry among us.
The chorus asks the
Spirit to :
‘Give your gifts’ and
‘Edify Your Church’
‘Bring your Truth’ and
‘Glorify Our Lord’
“Come be our Guide’
- “Point the Way” and
Walk Beside.
This song outlines very
simply in a few words what it just took me many words to explain.
Let’s sing this as our
Prayer Response to God’s Word. AMEN.
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