The Sixth Sunday after Trinity – Sunday 16 July A✠D 2023
✠ Psalmody: Psalm 28:8-9; 28:1-2a, 7;90:13, 1-2b;31:1
✠ Lection: Exodus 20:1-17;Romans 6:3-11;St. Matthew 5:20-26
In the Name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
There is no drudgery on any Sunday with which our dear Lord has blessed us, even if it occurs during the long, green, often times quite hot and humid, season of Trinity. Rather what we are given in our propers this morning is a rich dose of the Catechism. We, as Lutherans, worship neither Luther nor his most beneficial little book of Christian teaching, but instead Almighty God Who has given to us the Blessed Word that drove Luther into calling the Church of his day to repent and return to the true, unadulterated Good News of Jesus Christ. The Small Catechism, that tiny booklet that is but a few handfuls of pages in its original entirety, is a treasure to the Church as a whole because of how brilliantly it boils down the basic teachings of Christian doctrine as found in the Holy Scriptures. By the end of today’s Divine Service, you will have ventured through all six chief parts of the catechism to some degree. In the order that Luther laid them out, the 10 Commandments were proclaimed verbatim directly from where Yahweh spoke them in Exodus 20. A few moments ago, we recited, not the Apostles’, but the Nicene Creed, equally as bold and beneficial to putting words to the faith God has placed within us. The Lord’s Prayer will soon come as we pray to forgive others as we have been forgiven by our merciful Father. We have remembered our baptisms when the Triune Name of God was declared first and foremost and we heard the inspired words of St. Paul as he taught the Church in Rome about the riches of what the Redeemed receive in their Blessed Baptismal Waters that are combined with God’s Word. We confessed our sins and received the Holy Absolution, firmly believing that by it our sins are forgiven before God in heaven. And the Divine Service will culminate with the Anointed One coming in His most precious, sacrificed, resurrected, and ascended Body and Blood for us Christians to eat and to drink to deliver to us the strength and preservation we need in the one true faith unto life everlasting. Here this morning, are coming to us bountiful facets of the goodness of God in how He has dealt, is dealing, and will deal with us in accordance with His infinite, inexhaustible grace, mercy, and love. The truths taught by the Catechism, and thus by the Scriptures more importantly, your loving Father in heaven is pouring right into your ears and hearts this morning as that which you need to hear from Him.
With not only division running rampant in our world but with divisiveness being peddled as the necessary fix to our cultural woes, the importance of unity grows all the more weighty among us; those who cling to Christ for salvation. We have heard from our Lord fairly recently regarding His view upon us all as fallen descendants of Adam, all for whom Jesus came in the flesh and died, without a single exception of person. But, St. Paul, in the portion we heard in his letter to Rome this morning, is preaching to you a particular unity, not from the horizontal perspective according to the flesh, but one from the vertical perspective according to the spirit, meaning that the unity we share in Christ together is what the grace of your baptism means for you right this minute and in the very sight of God.
The perceived innocence of every baby, even those just conceived seconds prior in the womb and are but a microscopic human life, every little boy and girl seen as innocent, is at best a warm, fuzzy illusion. We rightfully love babies; probably most of all because they yet act and speak as vile as we do, yet the curse of original sin is still there in every one born in the flesh. From the moment of all of our conceptions, we each stood along the shoreline of death and condemnation with no hope of crossing to the distant land of righteousness that God demands of all mankind. The one path to cross was one that could only be brought about by the Almighty Himself, just as He did for Israel as they fled the slavery of Egypt and Pharaoh. Only through God’s death would the sinful, fallen world be delivered from its. It was into the deep waters of the tomb that Jesus descended so that your tomb would be broken forever. Into death He led, so that raised up into life all the more would He carry His bounty of souls, you numbered among them all. But St. Paul speaks not of a leisurely float to the distant, safe shore by means of sunglasses, a cold tropical drink, and a calm drift on an inflatable pool toy. Nor does He describe being pampered, cruising luxuriously aboard a ship that is stocked with all our favorites from the world. Our baptismal waters are ones that put to death what we unrighteously want to cling to while also raising us to walk in new life in Christ, seeking Him as example and these two actions aren’t smooth and easy. The old Adam never drowns and dies willingly or peacefully.
So that we may enjoy and reap the true full treasures of being baptized, so that we too might walk in newness of life, do not discount the full unity you have in Christ, that all of us who have been baptized into Him were baptized into His death. The journey from the shore of death to the land of life is a hard one for every human being because the sinful flesh desires the things that will drag you down into sin, to drown you with the despairs of hell instead of thriving on the promises of heaven. That flesh, fueled by the lies and deception of the father of lies, would have you rather view all suffering as of absolutely no benefit, that not only this world, but that God Almighty owes you an easy life, that the Christian life should be easy, as it gags you on the lie that this life shouldn’t be hard, especially not this hard. Dear Christian, understand that living in a world saturated to its very core by sin and wickedness, even within your own heart, that it all, especially your adversary the Devil, would’ve long ago had you destroyed and in the ground, crushed without hope, robbed of the joy that only comes from the one true source of life and goodness, for without God, such demise would’ve long happened to us all.
In the meanwhile, even as your dear Lord tarries, He actively delivers you from all that strives to snatch you from Him. He does this through your baptism; your death and life with Him. The world continues its desires and actions to expand the kingdom of darkness; to destroy the societal foundation of the nuclear family of a father plus a mother plus children; to groom the minds of children into thinking they are not the boy or girl that God made them to be; to push for fake equality, for their idea includes not those in most need of it in the womb; and to label people good or bad, not based on the objective Word of He by Whom all things were made, but by the latest loud trend delivered in toddler-tantrum style by the culture and its digital outlets. This is the world in which you live. This is the world in which your Savior lived, for He knew the Crucifixion would be in the first century. He knew of the countless plagues that had and would happen among the people of earth over the millennia. He knew all about 21st-century America. He knew about scamdemics, power-grabs, corruption, and gas-lighting, and He knows what still lies ahead. Lord, have mercy! All that and He came anyway! He stepped down from His heavenly throne and took on human flesh in order that all those who bear the same can follow Him into life through His death and through that of their own in those blessed waters. That is the death with which the Christian can have the most concern: the one that has already happened to them at the font; the one that is victory of the physical one that still lies ahead, for there is no other Name under heaven by which we can be saved. There is your Jesus, uniting you to Him in baptism, baptized into His death because constant dying, constant drowning of the Old Adam is needed for us all in every moment of time that remains this side of our graves, and dear brothers and sisters, this is a noble and eternally worthy fight. Chins up. Shields up. Swords up. Fight this good fight with courage in your Victor King! This is the baptismal life into which you have been placed in those Holy Waters; the life of getting at it, of dying to self, of walking in the newness of life He has given to you; in you being brought up out of your death; of you being delivered to the distant land of the living through the waters that were death to the sinful you, but life to the new you that has been born again from above by water and the Spirit. Horizontal unity is vain, futile, and merely temporary, if first there is no vertical unity with you being baptized into Christ, a saving work done by God Himself.
Your newness of life exists in a blessed place, in a healthy spiritual balance of right understanding of your sin and of the forgiveness that is yours, united in Christ Jesus, Who has overcome sin and death, even yours. Such a balance means not falling into the burdensome ditch of despair where you feel as though you must spend all your waken hours making sure to gather the list of your sins so that you do a required confession of them as if they wouldn’t be forgiven if you didn’t. That is not true. You may lay your head peacefully upon your pillow tonight and sleep in good cheer having prayed the Lord’s prayer, confident that He has heard you and that your sins are forgiven. Amen. Thanks be to God. Snore away, happy in the Lord. But nor does such a balance mean that you are never to consider where sin may have a foothold in your life or that you are doing too magnificent of a saintly job in living your days sin-free, for that isn’t true either. In between the extremes is true life lived where you soberly examine your life, confessing the sins that you notice, and having faith that you have forgiveness in Christ. And to comfort you further in this existence, the Lord has given you a church and life full of grace-filled defenses for you to wield against the enemies you face, including the sinful flesh with which you will continue to battle all the remaining ticks of the clock left in your life.
It is uncomfortable to drown the sins and evil desires that persist in us. It is uncomfortable to realize just how deep sin runs in us all, yet still there you were at the font, united with Him in a death like His, and certainly united with Him in a resurrection like His, one that isn’t put on hold until the final day, but completed then. You have been raised from the dead. Your life is secure, even in the division, the malice, the hatred of the world as it seeks to purge God from His own creation. Such is not of you. To fight well today and in what lies ahead, remember your baptism, that you are baptized, crucified with Christ and raised to the newness of life, of life that will have no end. He is your hope.
In ✠ Jesus’ Name. Amen.
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