READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Ezekiel 36:22-28
1 Peter 4:7-11
St. John 15:26-16:4
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
In the Name…
To you all, my true children in the common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.
Who speaks to us today, saying,
“But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you”
In these words from the Gospel, Jesus is predicting the future, once again. And the future He predicts is not very rosy. However, we know Jesus, the God-man, is not about fear and loneliness, but comfort and togetherness. Somehow, this passage about predicting our future suffering has got to be more than just “knowing the future”. Indeed it is, for Jesus does not just tell us about the future, He goes there with us, every step of the way.
How He does this is through His Incarnation, His being made man. With His own unique, reasonable Body and soul, God places Himself in time, becoming subject to its flow, all in order to do His work that the Holy Ghost might remind us.
So, as we stare at the extinguished Paschal candle, reminding us of Jesus’ Ascension to God’s Right Hand, we are once again drawn to Jesus’s words about the Last Days and this time we live in, seemingly “without Jesus”. This time, though, St. Peter joins Jesus in our Epistle Reading from today, saying, “The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers”.
Now, at first glace, we take St. Peter at his word and simply add these qualities he lists to the never ending list of personal traits that we need to work on and will probably never get to. But at least we know about them and can say that we’re in favor of them. That’s the same thing, right? However, this does not lead us to Jesus’ Ascension, neither does it illuminate anything about Easter or Jesus, for us.
And, while self-improvement is on Jesus’ radar as He is teaching, vastly more important to Him was His work in getting to Easter, His Ascension, and Pentecost. So, St. Peter’s words are significant to us, not only because of how we see the world acting in its death throes, but because we have just celebrated the Ascension of Christ and determined that after the Apostles saw Jesus ascend, they immediately went about offering church Services in the whole world.
Whoa, whoa. Ease off the gas pastor. That’s not what it says there. The church wasn’t even around during Apostolic times, at least not as we know it, right? The Apostles weren’t offering old dusty sermons in old and busted churches with old and moldy hymnals. They were preaching on the streets, holding secret, illegal gatherings, and having adventures defying the government. There were miracles and mighty signs that followed their preaching confirmed their message. Not like today.
So you say. But if you take a romp through the Book of Acts, you will find a very different picture of what you think the Apostles were doing. St. Mark gave us a clue on Ascension night when he said, after the Ascension, the Apostles “…went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs” (Mk. 16:20) in that preaching is the job of the priests and priests work in the Temple, or Church.
In all of the Apostolic sermons in Acts, the end goal that is revealed to us is baptism. After the sermons, the hearers asked, “what do we do now”? The Apostolic reply was always “Be baptized” (Acts 2:38, 8:12, 9:18, 10:48, etc). Of course Baptism is the Way to be united with the Body of Christ, the Church, and is what gives salvation (1 Pet 3:21), so why wouldn’t they be baptizing?
There were also readings (Acts 15:31) and hymns and prayer (Acts 14:23). All of the Book of Acts sets itself up to drive home the point that the Church, as even we would recognize it, was alive and thriving from Day 1. In fact, immediately after Ascension and Pentecost, the Apostles set out to devote themselves to the doctrines, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers (Acts 2:42).
So it comes to our attention that, somehow, the Apostles knew how to conduct the Divine Service right away, felt it was important enough to devote themselves to, and believed that this is what Jesus taught them to do. At least, that’s what their actions sound like to me and I hope, what they sound like to you.
The Church of Christ who devotes herself to Word and Sacrament did not evolve into what we know today, it was revealed more and more as time went on. Meaning, it was immediately present, as you would recognize it, as the Apostles, Christ’s chosen pastors, began to teach and preach the Gospel in its purity and truth in that first century. Which is why St. Peter can tell us to basically calm down as the world destroys itself around us, because, though Jesus has ascended, you don’t have time to worry about what the world does.
You don’t have the time, because God is going to Church and you must be there as well. You don’t have the luxury of falling into despair about this or that political ploy, because you have hymns to sing, loudly. You don’t have time to invest in the devil’s wiles and temptations or any other great shame and vice, because you have a place where you are needed with your prayers.
In our Alleluia Verse, taken from St. John 14:18 “I will not leave you comfortless” or as orphans. So when St. Peter tells us to be calm, our self-control and soberness stems from the safety offered in our Lord’s Orphanage: His Church and His Divine Service to us.
For we are orphans of the world. It has left us on the doorstep and in the wilderness unwanted and unloved. It will continue to expel us from luxuries it enjoys and continue to hate and shun us. Worse than that, we are from the world, and even though we gather here, our sinful desire to be a part of the in-crowd overtakes us and we mimic the world, in our sin.
Repent. We desire to be in, but not in the way Jesus wants us in. We desire to be special, but not in the way Jesus makes us special. We desire to be at peace, and the first thing we are more than willing to give up to be at peace is Jesus.
Dear Christians, Jesus has not left us without a ship in the port or a bed to sleep in. In fact, the promise in Ezekiel 36, heard in our Old Testament reading today, is that we are going to be gathered by God. He is going to gather us and, gasp, baptize us, see v. 25. You know, like gathering around a font of water someplace?
Modern day Jews are waiting for this gathering to happen in Jerusalem. The Apostles asked Jesus to restore His kingdom to Israel in Acts 1. But instead of that poor way of doing heavenly things only in a physical way, show of power and might in war and wealth, Jesus is going to do things His Way.
And we find this Way, and His instructions on How-To-Church, in Jesus’s last will and testament which He left to His Apostles and to us, in His Gospel. I mean, the real sense and meaning of the word “Gospel”, St. Luke 24:47 tells us, where Jesus is sending His Apostles out to preach the Gospel and that Gospel is the free forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake, by Grace, through faith.
So how did the Apostles come to interpret that the forgiveness of sins and the Gospel needs to be given in Church? All we need to do is look back on what Jesus said in the Gospels and remember. In St. John 5:24, “Whoever hears my Word and believes already has eternal life”. In v.25, even the dead can hear this Gospel which Jesus preaches. The same Gospel we hear.
Already in St. John 4:1, Jesus was baptizing everyone through His disciples. And finally, there is the Last Supper where Jesus says “Do this…for the forgiveness of sins”. Thus, when the Apostles are told to remember Jesus words and keep His commands, they formed the institution that grew up around those things of Christ, in order to do just that.
While Jesus wants an improved life from us, He wants a perfect life from us even more so. Thus, it falls within His work to give us that life, uniting with us in Baptism. This, God doesn’t just know the future and give us good things to do as we pass the time till it gets here. God acts now and places Himself within the past in order to get to the future with us along for the ride. God doesn’t just speak comfort, but offers it to you in a washing of rebirth and renewal, and in a seat at His Table.
So, by the Grace of Christ, we are able to hold onto our sanity, self-control, and sobriety in the face of false scarcity scares, false flags, fake news, and fake people. It is not that they don’t affect our lives by their “magnanimity”, but that Jesus gives us better things to do. Things that do not come up empty when accomplished, but instead fulfill the Word of Christ in our hearing, giving us eternal life with Him away from all this.
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