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READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Jeremiah 23:5-8
Romans 13:11-14
St. Matthew 21:1-9
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ. (2 Cor 1)
Jesus speaks to us on this first Sunday of the Church Year,
through His Gospel and says,
“And the crowds
that went before him and that followed him were shouting,
‘Hosanna to the
Son of David!
Blessed is He who
comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!’”
Who’s afraid of the big, bad Alphabet Soup? LGBT, BLM,
N-T-Fa, CRT, MSM, IRS. So many acronyms and so little time to be afraid. And
yet these are the very things that keep us up at night. They are thrown at us
and we cower in fear because they appear to have such great power behind
them.
Such that, once they are brought into the conversation or
debate, we immediately back down and concede. And who knows why? Maybe we
really don’t like liberty. Maybe we are ashamed. Most likely it is because you
don’t want to cause trouble.
Whatever it is, if you don’t want to be afraid, learn
history. It really is as simple as that, because the real power behind this
Alphabet Soup is “I know more than you do, nah nah na-nah nah”. It is the claim
that history is not what we think it is, and it usually isn’t, or at least it
usually isn’t what we were taught.
So they get us on two fronts: our wish that we knew more and
could be nice and our admission that we haven’t done our homework. And this is
inexcusable, for, as many complaints as we have of the internet, it is the most
access to information anyone has had in the history of the earth. You have
access to information that rivals doctorate degrees and, by studying, can make
yourself just as knowledgeable.
So who gave the first ground? Well, it wasn’t liberals or
democrats or anyone else regularly demonized on our idiot box.
It was the churches! Yes, it was God’s own churches that
first threw in the towel to these history-deniers and anti-historians. It came
from God’s own people attempting to appease the apparent scholarship of the day
and they called it Historical Criticism. historical-critical method, or higher
criticism later.
Not only did this come from churches, but it came out of
Lutheran churches in the 17th century, so soon after the Reformation. The goal
was to get at the meaning behind the words of the Bible. In other words,
scholars wanted to interpret the Bible (history) according to the time, place,
and people they think it was written to.
At first this doesn’t sound too bad, but this was not the
end goal of this method. Proponents of this Biblical hermeneutic wanted to then
interpret the Bible on the basis of their findings. They thought that their
studies were getting at the real meaning of God’s Word.
But by “real meaning” they don’t mean “what God wants us to hear”.
By “real meaning” they want to cast great doubt upon the Source of God’s Word,
they want to reduce God’s Word to simple literary devices, and they want to
redact God’s Word into what they think is the community and mindset of the time
it was written in.
What this implies is hubris of the utmost level. Since we
have attained this new enlightenment, we must now undertake the thankless task
of rooting out the truth for future generations. The only thing to have been
gleaned from this method is doubt about whether or not God’s Word is God’s Word
and whether or not Jesus is God.
In this light, all the acronyms mentioned before are
attempting the same thing, to rewrite history, only now that they think the
church has been thoroughly shot through, they have moved onto everyday life,
trying their hardest to reinterpret history as they see fit, in order to keep
you divided from your fellow man and to keep their jobs by pretending to have
accomplished something.
So, is the Church a lost cause? No. 1 John 2:19 says, “They
went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they
would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made
manifest, that none of them were of us.”
This is what Jesus meant when He said, “You will know
them by their fruits” (Mt 7:16). Not only are the fruits of historical
criticism discord and strife, but an abandoning of what God gave. First His
Word, then His faith.
“For both prophet and priest are profane; Yes, in My
house I have found their wickedness,” says the Lord.” (Jer 23:11).
Dear Christians, yes the devil, the world, and your sinful
nature divide and conquer and come to us in pleasing forms, as we discussed
last week. But the Lord continues in Jeremiah 23: “I have not sent these
prophets, yet they ran. I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied. But if
they had stood in My counsel, And had caused My people to hear My words then
they would have turned them from their evil way and from the evil of their
doings.” (v. 21-22)
What is our recourse except the Word of God. It is God’s
Word that is to be heard and it is God’s Word that turns from evil. No new
thinking or new idea or new elected official is going to fix anything. Only
History will do that.
Yes history, because it is in history that the Lord God has
spoken and it is in history that the Son of God has done His work. God speaks
this way when He says things like, “Come near to Me, hear this: I have not
spoken in secret from the beginning” (Isa 48:16). The beginning as in the
beginning of history.
And Jesus too says, “The former account I made, O
Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach” through St. Luke,
the Evangelist (Acts 1:1). Meaning all the things that the people had seen and
heard as a result of Jesus acting, were seen and heard in a very real and
provable past.
Your God also dwells in history, not just in your heart. A
history that He allows to confine Him to His Word. A history that is then
passed on to be heard and scrutinized, and doubted. Christ hides from nothing,
even this.
He welcomes the critics. He tells us to go talk to His
eyewitnesses of which there were so many more than just the 4 Gospels. 1
Corinthians 15 says, “He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. After
that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater
part remain to the present” (v. 5-6). Remain to the present, as in, were
still around to criticize the story.
And their criticism only proved the truth of God’s Work and
Word. No matter how many times the stories were told and retold, God’s history
was true history.
And now it has become our true history, as we begin Advent.
The stories, the facts, the hymns, and even the liturgy. All have been used and
approved of by generations of those who heard their history, learned their
history, and kept their history.
The time between the End of the Church Year and the
Beginning of a new one is only a week (Sundays), but the topic for both remains
the same. At the End of the Year we are awaiting Christ’s Coming and at the
beginning of the Year we are awaiting Christ’s coming.
The slight difference is that last week, we were focused on
waiting for God to fulfill His Promise to Come Again. This week, we remember
how God has always kept His promises He made to come among us. And what tells
us this is history.
The History of God saving His people from their sins, as
both God and man, Jesus making His preparations in order to bring us along. The
history of our Old Testament reading; the Righteous Branch hanging on a tree,
gathering, and giving His righteousness to all who believe in Him.
the History of our Gospel reading, where the God-man marches
on His own city, declaring Himself to be the King of kings Whom everyone has
been looking for in order to crucify. And the history of our Epistle, which
speaks to us today, in that now we have been brought into this wokeness, this
Daylight from on high, baptized into the Branch, baptized into Righteousness,
and baptized into history.
So we are fed our history, in the crucified Body and Blood
of Jesus, in order to stand against these dark times. We are fed that we are
not unmoored to be tossed to and fro by the wind and the waves, but we have
been planted upon the Ark of the Church, the Dreadnaught of the Seas. No wind
can assail Her and no Wave can capsize Her. And with Christ both Captain and
Rudder, no false doctrine can steer her wrong.
So, we wait, just as God waits. We wait for the evil of this
world to many, even though it may roll over us. But we do not wait as those
without hope. For we wait in the sure and certain hope that Christ will come and
He will bring us with Him, even if He has to drag us out of the grave.
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