READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Zechariah 9:9-12
Philippians 2:5-11
St. Matthew 26:1-27:66
Scarlet is the traditional color of Palm Sunday
Grace to you and peace. (1 Thess 1)
Jesus speaks to you on this day from His Gospel heard, saying:
Riding into Jerusalem, today, in order to get to His Passion, the only reason Jesus does anything, is Jesus’s work alone. No amount of our copying or aping will get us the same results it got Him. Neither will our recreation of the event bring us closer to God. The only thing that brings us close to God is what He says brings us close to God. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that it is not waving palm branches, but faith.
Although, the Divine Service of God evokes emotions, we do not deny, but confess that the emotions are fruits and not the root of heavenly gifts from God. So we keep our ceremonies in Church in order to be that full person as God intended, because we are both physical and spiritual, sinner and saint. Depending on who we are, what we are going through, and which part of the Service or the Word takes us at the moment, we all have very different reactions.
A latin phrase that you must know, as a Lutheran, is ex opere operato. It means “from the work worked”. The Roman Catholic church is adamant that a priest sacrificing the mass, gives its benefits to all believers, even to all those who aren’t in attendance, simply by the act or work. If a priest worked the Divine Service, many of the faithful would receive heavenly credit for him doing so, even if it was only the priest in attendance.
How does that make sense? The Lord and His work does such things. Simply by doing work, He works salvation for all. Truly, ex opere operato, because He does it with or without our prayers. His Word is the most powerful creative force in the realm. What He says, comes to pass and what He works, works. But a priest is not God.
Taking this thought and maybe applying it to God-uses-means-to-do-His-work-among-us and that Jesus left us in His ascension, maybe you can kinda understand why people want to need works and want them counted by God. God’s power still remains, but now without Christ here, allegedly, we are the only ones to work. So now, we believe, our work must work, regardless of who sees or participates.
Repent. The problem these teachers of the church have is always the same: the Sacraments. What you do with them reveals your confession. How we use the Sacraments, God’s Power on earth, shows what you believe about your God.
Lutherans count three sacraments. Yes, you heard that right. According to the Book of Concord, there is Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and Absolution. All have the spiritual promise of God attached to a physical means of His choosing. Or, to put it in Concord’s terms, “rites which have the command of God, and to which the promise of grace has been added” (Ap XIII:3).
Now we may count, but we do not count as a divine requirement for faith. We would never say, if you don’t have three like us, then you’re out. We also don’t count how many in order to limit God, but to limit ourselves. For if we were to run through the Holy Scriptures to find every promise that God makes, we would have so much more than 7 and communing with God would look like confusion.
If we were only concerned with numbering, we would have to add Prayer to the sacrament list. For many promises are attached to praying and it is commanded by God. Likewise, giving to the poor and suffering afflictions. Can you imagine a Church Service where everyone is required to suffer in some way? So much for an easy yoke and a light burden from Jesus!
Far more important than counting is using. In the Roman Catholic church, it is believed that the sacraments work regardless of your presence or participation or even whether or not you receive both the bread and wine. Meaning, a priest, somewhere in the world, can sacrifice a mass for you and you would receive the same benefits from it as if you had communed. Similar, I guess, to Jesus healing people from afar.
But, in this teaching, your world becomes empty of God. If your presence is not required why even go to church? Why not just do online church? You are just as present and just as irrelevant.
Spawned from this belief, come the Protestants who actually believe everything is a sacrament. Everything, except what God has ordained Himself, that is. They cleverly switch out the word “sacrament” for “ordinance” and there is no end to the counting of those. And when everything is a sacrament…nothing is. And the world is empty of God once again.
As we heard the Lord’s Supper instituted from the Passion reading today, similar questions pop up in our minds on how to make the Supper as authentic for us as it was for the Apostles. Is imitation enough? Do we have to find a Jewish meal of equivalence to be valid?
If we are concerned, the Last Supper does not start on Thursday evening. Jesus prepared beforehand. His cleansing of the Temple was a part of that preparation, “cleanse out the old leaven” (1 Cor 5:7), He says. And cleansing the Temple was a direct result of His procession into Jerusalem under palm branches. And His procession happened because He turned His face toward Jerusalem (Lk 9:51), in order that the Son of Man be handed over and crucified (Lk 9:43-45).
Why crucified? “because of one man's trespass, [Adam], death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:17).
This is why imitation and ordinance never work, because in order to get it right, you have to go back to the Garden of Eden, you have to go back to when it all started and begin your imitation there, all the way until you get to a cross, where one of you, then, will have to be lifted up and crucified. So who’s it gonna be?
Dear Christians, our Lord and Savior is our model and pattern, but it is an impossible pattern to follow. Thus, He is our model and pattern to which He molds us and stitches us into. Not the other way around. In order to have a model or pattern, one must first set it up and lay it out.
Jesus, both God and man, in the flesh, sets up, lays out, and completes His model and pattern to God’s standards. The model and pattern of God that we despised and crucified in our sin, has come to have a life of His own and works His own works. And they are accomplished ex opere operato, because He is God.
We love to call Jesus God and Lord, but forget what that means. We forget that the same Word, spoken from the mouth of a man, created the whole universe. We forget that, He Whose essence none can touch, Who, in the beginning, established the heavens, and Who rained manna on His people in the wilderness, was swaddled as a child.
When Jesus works, His works work. The Palm Sunday procession, done by Jesus alone, was in a way sacramental, but only for Jesus, not for us, because of what He was going to do at the end of the parade: ascend His cross and save us from our sins.
On His cross, He also purchased for us the imitation of Him, and model, and pattern. The sinner is against God, no matter how much he surrenders, so the pattern must be given and must come from outside of him, to remain unspoiled.
Having received that outside pattern, then, the sinner is grafted in as a saint, for Christ’s sake alone. It is then that this now sinner/saint is conformed to the image of Jesus, having been baptized into His suffering and death, and His resurrection. This, since we are not in the presence of Jesus’s baptism, suffering, death, or resurrection, must be taken by faith.
Circumcision was not what saved Abraham, but his belief, counted to him as righteousness. That is, Faith, freely given by the Holy Spirit of Christ, takes a hold of the promise and flourishes under the sign that God gives. Abraham must participate in circumcision, in order for his troubled conscience to be comforted by God’s Promise made concerning circumcision.
In other words, we must participate in God’s Sacraments, in order for our troubled consciences to be comforted by God’s Promise made concerning them. We use the Sacraments by Faith: how they are given, how they are handled, what they are, and where and when Jesus says they are effective.
For instance, we can have this baptismal font full of water, 24/7. It does us no good, except that we use it. We can call it holy water all we want, but if it is not forgiving sins, it is just plain water.
Augustine says that the faith of the Sacrament, and not the Sacrament, justifies. And the declaration of Paul is well known, Rom. 10:10: “With the heart man believes unto righteousness.” (Ap XIII:23)
Jesus speaks to you on this day from His Gospel heard, saying:
“But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man
seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
Riding into Jerusalem, today, in order to get to His Passion, the only reason Jesus does anything, is Jesus’s work alone. No amount of our copying or aping will get us the same results it got Him. Neither will our recreation of the event bring us closer to God. The only thing that brings us close to God is what He says brings us close to God. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that it is not waving palm branches, but faith.
Although, the Divine Service of God evokes emotions, we do not deny, but confess that the emotions are fruits and not the root of heavenly gifts from God. So we keep our ceremonies in Church in order to be that full person as God intended, because we are both physical and spiritual, sinner and saint. Depending on who we are, what we are going through, and which part of the Service or the Word takes us at the moment, we all have very different reactions.
A latin phrase that you must know, as a Lutheran, is ex opere operato. It means “from the work worked”. The Roman Catholic church is adamant that a priest sacrificing the mass, gives its benefits to all believers, even to all those who aren’t in attendance, simply by the act or work. If a priest worked the Divine Service, many of the faithful would receive heavenly credit for him doing so, even if it was only the priest in attendance.
How does that make sense? The Lord and His work does such things. Simply by doing work, He works salvation for all. Truly, ex opere operato, because He does it with or without our prayers. His Word is the most powerful creative force in the realm. What He says, comes to pass and what He works, works. But a priest is not God.
Taking this thought and maybe applying it to God-uses-means-to-do-His-work-among-us and that Jesus left us in His ascension, maybe you can kinda understand why people want to need works and want them counted by God. God’s power still remains, but now without Christ here, allegedly, we are the only ones to work. So now, we believe, our work must work, regardless of who sees or participates.
Repent. The problem these teachers of the church have is always the same: the Sacraments. What you do with them reveals your confession. How we use the Sacraments, God’s Power on earth, shows what you believe about your God.
Lutherans count three sacraments. Yes, you heard that right. According to the Book of Concord, there is Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and Absolution. All have the spiritual promise of God attached to a physical means of His choosing. Or, to put it in Concord’s terms, “rites which have the command of God, and to which the promise of grace has been added” (Ap XIII:3).
Now we may count, but we do not count as a divine requirement for faith. We would never say, if you don’t have three like us, then you’re out. We also don’t count how many in order to limit God, but to limit ourselves. For if we were to run through the Holy Scriptures to find every promise that God makes, we would have so much more than 7 and communing with God would look like confusion.
If we were only concerned with numbering, we would have to add Prayer to the sacrament list. For many promises are attached to praying and it is commanded by God. Likewise, giving to the poor and suffering afflictions. Can you imagine a Church Service where everyone is required to suffer in some way? So much for an easy yoke and a light burden from Jesus!
Far more important than counting is using. In the Roman Catholic church, it is believed that the sacraments work regardless of your presence or participation or even whether or not you receive both the bread and wine. Meaning, a priest, somewhere in the world, can sacrifice a mass for you and you would receive the same benefits from it as if you had communed. Similar, I guess, to Jesus healing people from afar.
But, in this teaching, your world becomes empty of God. If your presence is not required why even go to church? Why not just do online church? You are just as present and just as irrelevant.
Spawned from this belief, come the Protestants who actually believe everything is a sacrament. Everything, except what God has ordained Himself, that is. They cleverly switch out the word “sacrament” for “ordinance” and there is no end to the counting of those. And when everything is a sacrament…nothing is. And the world is empty of God once again.
As we heard the Lord’s Supper instituted from the Passion reading today, similar questions pop up in our minds on how to make the Supper as authentic for us as it was for the Apostles. Is imitation enough? Do we have to find a Jewish meal of equivalence to be valid?
If we are concerned, the Last Supper does not start on Thursday evening. Jesus prepared beforehand. His cleansing of the Temple was a part of that preparation, “cleanse out the old leaven” (1 Cor 5:7), He says. And cleansing the Temple was a direct result of His procession into Jerusalem under palm branches. And His procession happened because He turned His face toward Jerusalem (Lk 9:51), in order that the Son of Man be handed over and crucified (Lk 9:43-45).
Why crucified? “because of one man's trespass, [Adam], death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:17).
This is why imitation and ordinance never work, because in order to get it right, you have to go back to the Garden of Eden, you have to go back to when it all started and begin your imitation there, all the way until you get to a cross, where one of you, then, will have to be lifted up and crucified. So who’s it gonna be?
Dear Christians, our Lord and Savior is our model and pattern, but it is an impossible pattern to follow. Thus, He is our model and pattern to which He molds us and stitches us into. Not the other way around. In order to have a model or pattern, one must first set it up and lay it out.
Jesus, both God and man, in the flesh, sets up, lays out, and completes His model and pattern to God’s standards. The model and pattern of God that we despised and crucified in our sin, has come to have a life of His own and works His own works. And they are accomplished ex opere operato, because He is God.
We love to call Jesus God and Lord, but forget what that means. We forget that the same Word, spoken from the mouth of a man, created the whole universe. We forget that, He Whose essence none can touch, Who, in the beginning, established the heavens, and Who rained manna on His people in the wilderness, was swaddled as a child.
When Jesus works, His works work. The Palm Sunday procession, done by Jesus alone, was in a way sacramental, but only for Jesus, not for us, because of what He was going to do at the end of the parade: ascend His cross and save us from our sins.
On His cross, He also purchased for us the imitation of Him, and model, and pattern. The sinner is against God, no matter how much he surrenders, so the pattern must be given and must come from outside of him, to remain unspoiled.
Having received that outside pattern, then, the sinner is grafted in as a saint, for Christ’s sake alone. It is then that this now sinner/saint is conformed to the image of Jesus, having been baptized into His suffering and death, and His resurrection. This, since we are not in the presence of Jesus’s baptism, suffering, death, or resurrection, must be taken by faith.
Circumcision was not what saved Abraham, but his belief, counted to him as righteousness. That is, Faith, freely given by the Holy Spirit of Christ, takes a hold of the promise and flourishes under the sign that God gives. Abraham must participate in circumcision, in order for his troubled conscience to be comforted by God’s Promise made concerning circumcision.
In other words, we must participate in God’s Sacraments, in order for our troubled consciences to be comforted by God’s Promise made concerning them. We use the Sacraments by Faith: how they are given, how they are handled, what they are, and where and when Jesus says they are effective.
For instance, we can have this baptismal font full of water, 24/7. It does us no good, except that we use it. We can call it holy water all we want, but if it is not forgiving sins, it is just plain water.
Augustine says that the faith of the Sacrament, and not the Sacrament, justifies. And the declaration of Paul is well known, Rom. 10:10: “With the heart man believes unto righteousness.” (Ap XIII:23)
No comments:
Post a Comment