Sermon for Reformation Sunday – October 29, 2023

by Jeffrey Spencer | Oct 31, 2023 | Sermons

CLICK HERE for a worship video for October 29

Sermon for Reformation Sunday – October 29, 2023

Jeremiah 31:31-34, Romans 3:19-28, John 8:31-36

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.

“If you continue in my word,” Jesus said, “you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

Martin Luther continued in the Word. As a monk and a scholar he had the privilege of studying the Bible, God’s written Word, at a time when many did not have access to the scriptures. The printing press was still a very new invention, and there just weren’t that many copies of the Bible available. But Luther had access to the scriptures, and the more he continued in the Word, the more he discovered that the truth he found there didn’t align with the so-called truth that was being taught and practiced in the church at that time.

And so it was that on October 31^st in the year 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. He wanted to have a conversation about the truth he had found in God’s Word. He had 95 debating points, 95 truth claims gleaned from the scriptures, that he wanted to discuss so that the church could get back to the truth he found there. By posting it on the church door on All Hallow’s Eve, right before people would be pouring into church for All Saints Day worship services, he ensured that lots of people would see it.

Well, lots of people saw it alright! Those new-fangled printing presses resulted in copies of the 95 theses spreading all over Europe. The truth claims Luther was making struck a nerve. Luther’s call for the church to return to the truths found in God’s Word unleashed a firestorm that eventually led to him to being declared a heretic and an outlaw. Long before people ever talked about cancel culture, the medieval church tried to cancel Martin Luther. They burned his books. He was excommunicated from the church. He had a bounty placed on his head and was hunted like a common criminal, which made it necessary for him to spend nearly a year in hiding.

Luther unwittingly unleashed a fierce battle for the truth. On one side you had medieval church bureaucrats and councils and bishops claiming they had authority over the truth. The truth was whatever they said it was, which just so happened to be whatever advanced their power and lined their pockets. The most obscene example of this was the sale of certificates of forgiveness called indulgences. Instead of freely proclaiming forgiveness in Jesus’ name as commanded in scripture, Christ’s forgiveness was turned into something that could be bought and sold. Forget confession. Forget repentance. Forget the absolution. You could just buy a handy-dandy certificate and you’d be covered. You could even buy forgiveness for future sins! The church authorities made a fortune selling their version of the truth. This part of the story is pretty well known.

What might not be as well known is that once the Reformation was underway you also had what came to be called the “enthusiasts.” The enthusiasts claimed that the truth was whatever they felt it was. They claimed direct revelations from God not only independent from the church, but apart from the scriptures! The truth, for the enthusiasts, was based on their own individual thoughts and feelings. Once Luther opened that Pandora’s Box, they felt empowered to advance their versions of the truth as well. And so the Reformation was a time of great confusion about what the truth even was.

Does this sound at all familiar? We too live in a time of widespread confusion about what the truth is, about where the truth can be found, about what truths we should live by.

We too live in a time of changing technology. Like the printing press 500 years ago, the internet and especially social media have changed the conversation about the truth in dramatic ways, both good and bad. On the one hand, the internet has made it so that the lies broadcast by major media institutions long seen as authoritative no longer go unchallenged, but on the other hand it has also provided easy platforms for a million more liars!

Fast on the heels of the internet is the unfolding emergence of “artificial intelligence,” or “AI,” which, out of thin air, can produce astonishingly realistic images and videos with voice cloning. If you think those fake texts you sometimes get, supposedly from me, asking for gift cards, are confusing and disturbing, wait until you get a phone call with a fake version of my exact voice, or the exact voice of a family member, pleading for something, interacting with you in real time. It’s already happening. The struggle to discern what is true, what is real, is only going to get more difficult.

Adding to this confusion is the postmodern malaise of extreme subjectivism, where the truth is whatever someone’s feelings tell them it is. As with the enthusiasts of Luther’s time, there is a widespread belief in our own time that all truth is self-determined, that we define our own realities. This is not new. This is not progress. This is the oldest trick the devil has, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden, when the serpent hissed to Eve, “Did God really say,” encouraging her to live her own truth and eat the fruit God had told her not to eat. And the result continues to be chaos and conflict and confusion.

“If you continue in my word,” Jesus said, “you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” So what is this truth, and how does it make us free?

As Luther battled both the authoritarians on the one hand and the enthusiasts on the other, he called both to the truth he found in God’s written word. The scriptures are the place to find the Truth above all truths. The Bible contains God given truths for us to live by.

The scriptures, Luther taught, proclaim God’s Word of law and gospel, God’s Word of command and God’s Word of promise. The scriptures contain both the deepest truth about us and the deepest truth about God.

The truth about us, as we hear from Jeremiah this morning, is that we have broken the covenant God has made with us. The truth about us, as St. Paul says in our reading from Romans for today, is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The truth about us, as Jesus says in the gospel reading, is that everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin, and a slave doesn’t have a permanent place in the household. The scriptures tell the truth about us, the truth about our situation, the truth about our fallen human nature, the truth about our need for redemption, for salvation.

Thankfully, the scriptures also tell us the truth about God. The truth about God is that, as Jeremiah says, he forgives our iniquities and remembers our sin no more. The truth about God, as St. Paul teaches us, is that he has redeemed us, he has saved us, he has made us right with him through Jesus. We are justified by his grace as a gift, received through faith in him. The truth about God, as Jesus says in our gospel reading, is that he has sent his Son to make us free, so that we will no longer be slaves to sin, so that we will have a permanent place in the household.

This freedom is not a freedom to pursue our own versions of the truth. Christian freedom isn’t freedom to do whatever we want! As St. Paul so aptly puts it in Romans 6: “You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.” We are freed from sin and death and freed for a life lived in right relationship with God, a life that aligns with the truth God has revealed to us.

In a time of radically changing information technology and cultural upheaval, a time of chaos and conflict and confusion, we will continue to fumble our way through truth claims. We will probably continue to argue and disagree about what is true with a small ‘t.’

But as Christians of the Reformation, we have a heritage which continues to call us back again and again to the capital ‘T’ truth found in God’s Word. It is this truth that we can hold onto in the midst of everything going on around us. It is this truth that unites us as God’s people. It is this truth that we can all strive to live our lives by. It is this truth that we can share with a weary and confused and hurting world.

As Christians of the Reformation, we have a heritage which calls us again and again to do exactly what Jesus calls us to do today: to continue in his Word. It is in continuing in Christ’s Word that we are truly his disciples. It is in continuing in Christ’s Word that we come to know the truth that makes us free. And if the Son makes us free, we will be free indeed.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer

Oak Harbor Lutheran Church

Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost – October 22, 2023

by Jeffrey Spencer | Oct 23, 2023 | Sermons

CLICK HERE for a worship video October 22

Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost – October 22, 2023

Matthew 22:15-22

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

In our gospel reading for today we hear the Pharisees try to trap Jesus with a hot button question. It was a question pertaining to one of the biggest, most divisive issues of the day: “Was it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?” Many Jewish people despised paying taxes to Rome. They resented having to carry around coins with a picture of the emperor on it and words etched in proclaiming him to be a god, and they certainly didn’t like having to fund their own oppression by paying them taxes.

But not everyone hated paying these taxes. Some Jewish people were okay with it. A group called the Herodians saw some advantages to having Rome in Israel. They recognized that the Roman Empire brought with it some benefits. It’s like that scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” set in Israel in the time of Jesus, where one of the Jewish characters says, “What has Rome ever done for us?” And his Jewish friend says, “Well, there’s the aquaducts, and sanitation, and the roads, and irrigation, and medicine, and education.” The Herodians thought paying taxes to Rome was a good deal.

“So Jesus,” the Pharisees asked, “what do you say? Is it lawful (meaning under Jewish religious law) to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”

This was a hot button issue. There was a lot at stake in Jesus’ answer. If Jesus said it was lawful to pay the tax, he would be seen by many as advocating idolatry and being complicit with a foreign enemy. If he said it was unlawful, he would be labeled a revolutionary and handed over to Roman authorities. Remember, the Pharisees asked him this question to trap him. They wanted to throw him in the middle of this debate so they could watch him get torn apart. Either way he answered would get him in big trouble, and they would be rid of him at last.

The first thing Jesus does in response is to bluntly call them hypocrites. He knows they have those idolatrous coins jingling in their own pockets as they speak. He asks for one of them. Then he asks whose image is on it. When they answered, “The emperor’s,” he said, “Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperors and give to God the things that are God’s.”

What does this mean, exactly? It sounds like some kind of riddle. Technically, everything belongs to God! Every Jewish person knew that! So was it lawful to pay the tax, or not? Both sides seem to have been scratching their heads over Jesus’ answer. Neither side got upset. The Pharisees were amazed that he managed to step around their trap. They left him and went away.

But Jesus answer was so much more than an artful dodge. “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and give to God the things that are God’s” is not really a riddle. Instead, Jesus is redirecting the focus of the conversation to something even more urgent. Jesus cuts through the heat of this hot button issue to focus on something bigger. The bigger question for Jesus isn’t whether they should give the emperor his coin; it was whether they were giving themselves to God.

You see, the coins they had might have carried the image of the emperor, but they themselves carried the image of God. The people themselves, with their talents, their gifts, their resources, their lives, they bore the image of God. As it says in Genesis 1:27, as the first human beings were created, “So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.”

“Give to God the things that are God’s,” Jesus says. Just as the coins bear the image of the emperor and should be given to him, human beings bear the image of God – and so we are called to give our whole entire selves to him. We are to dedicate everything we have, everything we are, to God, whose image we bear.

In his book, “Giving to God,” Mark Allen Powell tells a story about the mission work done among the Gauls in medieval times. The Gauls were a bloodthirsty people living in what is now France and Belgium. Christians missionaries entered the region to share the gospel and were very successful. Many of the Gauls converted to Christianity, even many of their warriors. Before sanctuaries with baptismal fonts, baptism took place by full immersion in a river or a lake, and when the warriors were baptized, many of them insisted on leaving their right arm out of the water. They explained that they wanted to leave one arm unbaptized so that they could continue to slay their enemies without mercy.

Powell suggests that this is more of a medieval version of an urban legend than historical fact, but it does provide a striking metaphor for something that afflicts God’s people of all times and places. We don’t want to give our whole selves to God. We might not leave one arm unbaptized so as to keep on slaying our enemies without mercy, but we are very good at compartmentalizing our lives, leaving God out of certain parts. We all hold back parts of ourselves from God so we can keep on doing some things our own way. I once saw a cartoon in a stewardship book that had a guy getting baptized with one arm out of the water, but instead of holding a sword he was holding his wallet.

“Give to God the things that are God’s,” Jesus says. That means everything. It means both arms. It means every body part (yes, even those ones). It means every last part of you, every last part of your life. It means your entire, undivided heart. It means all your talents. It means all your treasures, all your coins – no matter whose face is on them.  This doesn’t mean all or even most of our money needs to be given to the church, but all of it is to be used for the glory of God. All of our lives are to be given over to God in joyful obedience. We were made in the image of God, and so we are to give ourselves, every last part of our lives, to him.

So didn’t Jesus care about the question at hand? Didn’t he care about that hot button issue? Didn’t he care about the difficult position the Jewish people were in as they had to carry this idolatrous money around in their pockets all the time, money they had to use to fund their own oppression?

I’m sure he did. But Jesus didn’t come into the world to sort out those problems, as pressing and difficult as they were. Jesus didn’t come to enforce the commandments, even the commandment against idolatry – as important as that is. Jesus didn’t come to start the Jerusalem Tea Party, starting a revolution against Rome and their taxes.

Jesus came to do something much bigger. Jesus came to conquer a much bigger enemy.

Jesus came to save the Pharisees from their hypocrisy. He came to save the Herodians from their complicity. He came to save ordinary Jews from their idolatry. He came to save all human beings from their sin.

Jesus didn’t come to overthrow Rome, he came to overthrow the power of sin, death, and the devil. He didn’t come to offer his thoughts on the tax code, he came to collect for God all the precious human beings made in God’s image. And when we refused to give ourselves entirely to God, he gave himself entirely for us on the cross.

There is no doubt we have many pressing and difficult problems in our own time. There is no doubt that the American people, including us here in this sanctuary, are as divided about many of those problems and their possible solutions as the Pharisees and the Herodians were about theirs. We are not called to put our heads in the sand about these issues. We are not called to ignore them or pretend they don’t exist. One of our vocations is that of citizen, and so we are called as Christians to engage in those hot button issues.

But at the same time, when we gather to hear from the Lord Jesus, we can’t let those hot button issues get in the way of what Christ has to say to us. He comes to us with even bigger concerns in mind. He comes to address our deeper problems.

Today our Lord Jesus reminds us of something we forget all the time: that we are made in the image of God – every person, every body part, every cell. In holy baptism Jesus goes a step further and inscribes his name on us, so that we would be certain that we belong to him!

“Give to God the things that are God’s,” he says to us today.

God wants more than chump change. God wants you. And through the saving work of his dear Son, he has claimed you, he has redeemed you, he has saved you, he has cleansed you through the forgiveness of sin and made you his own.

Give to God the things that are God’s. You are already his, so let the whole of your life bear witness to the image you bear and the name which was inscribed upon you.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer

Oak Harbor Lutheran Church

Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost – October 15, 2023

by Jeffrey Spencer | Oct 17, 2023 | Sermons

CLICK HERE for a worship video for October 15

Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost – October 15, 2023

Isaiah 25:1-9, Matthew 22:1-14

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

When my wife and I got married, in the days leading up to the wedding there was a question hanging over the preparations: “What would Uncle Dan wear?” You see, Amy’s Uncle Dan has a history of showing up to family events looking like he just stumbled out of a deer stand, which, oftentimes, he had. He is notoriously anti-suit and tie. Before the wedding he told everyone, “I’ll come, but I am NOT wearing a suit. I don’t wear suits, and I’m not going to start now.”

To Amy and me, the question of what Uncle Dan would wear was more of a joke than anything else. We didn’t really care whether he wore a suit or not. While our wedding ceremony was quite formal with a full communion liturgy, held in an Episcopal church in Bellingham where Amy’s prim and proper Grandmother was a member, even so we had plenty of college friends in Bellingham who would be attending in more casual attire.

But it was not a joke to my father-in-law. He didn’t want his brother showing up to this formal affair in camo or denim. This was his daughter’s wedding! This was her special day. This would be a sacred moment in the life of the family. And so my father-in-law brought an extra suit, met his brother at the church door and said, “Put it on.” Which he did.

In the parable we hear today Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a wedding banquet given by a king. The king sends out servants to call those who had been invited, but they wouldn’t come. The king sends out his servants again, this time with a glimpse of the menu – “Look, the fattened calf has been slaughtered! The prime rib is almost ready! It’s going to be great!” But they made light of it. They still wouldn’t come. So, in what might be seen as just a bit of an overreaction, the spurned king sends in his troops and burns down their entire city. Then the king sends out his servants again. This time they go out into the streets and invite all different kinds of people – both good and bad. And soon the wedding hall was filled with guests.

But there’s one last plot twist in the story. One of these guests who had been so graciously welcomed into the wedding banquet wasn’t wearing the right clothes. He didn’t put on the traditional wedding robe. When the king noticed this, he said, “How did you get in here without a wedding robe?” When he gave no reply, the king had him bound and thrown out into “the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Yikes. Talk about a strictly enforced dress code!

This parable, like the one we heard last week, is an allegory. And like the vineyard parables we’ve been hearing the last few weeks, this parable makes use of a common image in the Bible. The prophets, including Isaiah in our first reading for today, had been saying for centuries that when the Messiah came, it would be like a great wedding banquet. God and God’s people would be joined together as one forever, and a great feast would be held to celebrate – a feast of rich foods, a feast of well-aged wines strained clear.

This is important background in understanding this parable. Like the parable we heard last week, Jesus is telling a story which describes his coming into the world. It is a story which convicts those who are rejecting him.

The king in the story is God. This might make us uncomfortable, with the king’s short temper and violent lashing out, but the prophets often spoke of God’s wrath using such stark imagery. It should be taken seriously. It is meant to get our attention.

The servants are God’s prophets, sent again and again to prepare the way for the Messiah. Again and again they are ignored – or worse – by the religious authorities.

The wedding banquet represents the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the promised Savior. The chief priests and the Pharisees were the original invitees. They ignored the invitation to receive Jesus as the Messiah, and in so doing they rejected the king. The people on the street who are invited into the wedding banquet are all the people who were receiving Jesus with joy, all the people Jesus was bringing into the kingdom – the foreigners, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the sinners.

So far, so good. So far, this says almost the exact same thing as the parable of the tenants in the vineyard last week. But then there’s this plot twist at the end. There’s this odd scene at the end where one of the people brought into the banquet is kicked out for not wearing the right clothes. He isn’t wearing a wedding robe and so he gets the boot. What is Jesus trying to say here?

We often talk about God’s invitation into his kingdom as being unconditional, open to all. And it is! Remember, Jesus specifically said both good and bad are welcomed in! However, what Jesus seems to be saying here is that while the invitation is universal and unconditional, this invitation will also require a change of clothes.

What exactly is this change of clothes? Parables are like poems in that they can be interpreted in different ways, and this parable certainly has had various interpretations over the years. In the early church it was taught that the wedding robe represented holiness of life. In the fourth century, St. Augustine taught that it represented love. Martin Luther insisted that these new clothes represented faith. C. S. Lewis suggested that the wedding robe represented joy.

I don’t think we have to pick one of these interpretations. I think they can all be right. I think they are facets on a diamond, collectively pointing to the fact that being invited to the wedding banquet brings with it a change of clothes! In other words, this invitation will change us, and if it doesn’t, something is wrong! This invitation means leaving behind the dingy clothes of the old life, soiled as they are by sin. It means putting on the new life. It means putting on those qualities St. Paul encourages us to put on in our reading from Philippians, putting on what is true, what is honorable, what is just, what is pure, what is pleasing. It means putting on what is commendable to our king, our host, our Lord. Too many people come into the church wanting to change it rather than to be changed by it. But this invitation, open to all, changes us! There are old garments, old morals – or lack thereof, old ideologies, old worldviews, old attitudes, old behaviors, which need to be left behind in order to be clothed in the new garments of holiness and love, faith and joy.

Thomas Long, a Bible scholar at Emory University, summarizes this point in his commentary on Matthew with a real zinger. He writes, “To come into the church in response to the gracious, altogether unmerited invitation of Christ and then not conform one’s life to that mercy is to demonstrates spiritual narcissism so profound that one cannot tell the difference between the wedding feast of the Lamb and happy hour in a bus station bar.”

Yes, all are invited, but what we wear matters. I’m not talking literally about what we wear to church. Dressing respectably when attending worship is a good practice, but this goes deeper. This is about clothing our lives in the qualities that give honor to our king.

When my father-in-law met his brother at the door with a suit and said, “Put it on,” it was a command, no doubt about it. But it was also a gift. My father-in-law brought his own suit and gave it to his brother. He knew that his brother didn’t have a suit of his own and so he provided it for him out of his own closet.

Similarly, this word we have from our Lord Jesus today is both law and gospel. It is both a command and a gift. You see, just as my father-in-law gave his brother the suit he needed for the wedding, so too does Christ give us what we need to be properly clothed. Knowing that we don’t have the right clothes ourselves, he gives them to us as a gift. Out of Christ’s own closet, he gives us his holiness, his love, his faith, his joy. This is what God, our King, does! As Isaiah writes in another passage which would be fitting for today, “God has clothed me in the garments of salvation and covered me with the robe of salvation.” This is what God is doing in Christ! This is what God has done for you! As St. Paul teaches us in Galatians, in holy baptism we are “clothed in Christ.” We are dressed in his righteousness.

Just like the suit, this wedding robe is a gift. The proper clothes we need are given to us as a gift of grace.

We have pictures of Uncle Dan at our wedding. He looks funny in the suit given to him by my father-in-law. But you know what? In the pictures, he’s smiling. He’s holding his plate and grinning. He left his old clothes in the bathroom of the church hall and entered into the joy of the occasion.

You are clothed in Christ, and so you have a place at the wedding banquet. It is here at his table that he feeds you with rich food, with well-aged wine strained clear. Leave the old garments behind and come. Enter into the joy of this occasion. Let us all be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer

Oak Harbor Lutheran Church