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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that, in the United States, more people are committing suicide now than a decade ago. And, the problem is apparently worse among middle-aged, white men and women, especially in the West and South. Analysts blame the country’s economic difficulties, and say a contributing factor is the increased sale and abuse of prescription painkillers, which either can be used in an overdose or can put someone in a frame of mind to attempt suicide by other means. The analysts go on to suggest that those white men and women aged 35 to 64 tend not to have the same kind of church support and extended families that their black and Hispanic counterparts have. Our Lord Jesus’s words from the Gospel Reading seem particularly relevant: “In the world you will have tribulation” but “I have said these things to you, that in Me you may have peace.” Thus, the theme for this sermon on this Sixth Sunday of Easter is “Tribulation and Peace”.
Today’s Gospel Reading picks up right where last week’s Gospel Reading left off, on the night Jesus was betrayed, as He concluded His final teaching to His disciples—His teaching about their relationship to Him, His Father, and the Holy Spirit; about prayer in His Name; about the world persecuting them; about His being separated from them for a time; and about their sorrow turning to joy and, amid tribulation, their peace.
In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus says quite clearly: “In the world you will have tribulation.” Jesus knew the people of Israel had experienced tribulation throughout the Old Testament, and Jesus knew the difficulties the disciples and other believers in their day had faced, were facing, and would face. Jesus likewise knows the difficulties you and I and all other people today have faced, are facing, and will face. Jesus knows the kind of depression that is enough to lead some people to suicide, such as depression induced by economic, family, health, or other adversities. Jesus knows the kind of overconfidence some have, such as the disciples’ thinking they believed and understood something, even when their failure under fire was only hours away. Jesus knows the kind of doubt and despair we can have, such as doubting that He actually forgives our sins. In short, Jesus knows the reality and the necessity of the tribulation we experience in our own personal lives—tribulation that can be described as death at work in us, death on account of both the original sin that we inherit and the actual sin that it in turn leads us to commit, in thought, word, and deed, things we have done and things we have left undone.
As Jesus in the Gospel Reading with a rhetorical question challenged the disciples’ overconfidence in thinking they believed and understood something, so Jesus with the Gospel Reading and in other ways challenges us. He calls us to repent of depression that leads to thoughts of suicide. He calls us to repent of overconfidence in belief and understanding. He calls us to repent of doubt and despair. He calls us to repent of all our sin and of our sinful natures themselves. He calls us to turn in sorrow from them, to trust God the Father to forgive them for Jesus’s sake, and to want to do better. And so, we repent! When we so repent, then God forgives us. As we sang in the Introit, our hearts are in anguish within us, the terrors of death have fallen upon us, but we “call to God”, and the Lord saves us; any time of day He hears our voices, and He redeems our souls in safety from the battles that we wage (Psalm 55:22, 4, 16-18).
For my birthday this year, my sister and brother‑in‑law bought me a pair of personalized running shoes made by Nike. The Nike name and trademark “swoosh” have been in use since the early 19-70s, thanks in part to runner Jeff Johnson, the first full-time employee of the budding company previously known as “Blue Ribbon Sports”. You may know that Johnson supposedly took the company’s “Nike” name from the Greek name of the winged goddess of victory, who is identified with the Roman goddess Victoria. This past week I was reflecting on the origin of the shoe company’s name as I studied the Gospel Reading, because the Reading closes with Jesus’s using the Greek verb nikáo to say that He Himself has “overcome” the world—He has conquered, carried off the victory, come off victorious over sin, death, and the power of the devil, for us! Out of His great love for you and for me, Jesus came from the Father and came into the world. The Father made Him, Who knew no sin, to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21), and, instead of forsaking us for eternity, the Father forsook Him on the cross (Psalm 22:2; Matthew 27:42; Mark 15:34). Once Jesus atoned for our sins, the Father raised Him from the dead (Acts 2:24; 10:40). Then, as Jesus told the disciples He would, He left the world and went back to the Father. As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there without first watering the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, so Jesus, the Father’s Word, went out and did not return without first accomplishing that which the Father purposed, succeeding in the thing for which He sent it (Isaiah 55:10-11).
That same Word of Holy Scripture, Jesus, is now equally successful for us. He comes to us in His preached Word, in His Word connected with water in Holy Baptism, in His Word spoken by a pastor in individual Holy Absolution, and in His Word connected with bread and wine that are His body and blood in the Sacrament of the Altar. In such ways He comes to us and opens our hearts, as He did with Lydia and her household as well in the First Reading (Acts 16:9-15), writing their names and ours in the Lamb’s book of life, as the Epistle Reading describes (Revelation 21:9-14, 21-27). In such ways He makes it possible for us to have peace.
In the Gospel Reading, Jesus makes quite a contrast between the tribulation we will have in the world and the peace we may have in Him. As Jesus says, there will be tribulation in the world, for believers and unbelievers alike. Yet, amid that tribulation, we may have peace in Him, by grace through faith. We may have the same peace the angels declared at Jesus’s birth: peace on earth, peace between God and the people on whom His favor rests (Luke 2:14). We may have the same peace Jesus gave to His disciples Easter Evening and again a week later, when showing them His nail-marked hands and spear-pierced side (John 20:19, 21, 26). That same peace He offers all through preaching, Baptism, Absolution, and the Supper. That same peace is ours who believe, already now in Jesus, even amid the tribulation we experience in the world. We can take heart, be encouraged, because Jesus has overcome the world. In Him, by faith, we overcome the world, too. We may see things fall apart around us, our bodies weaken and fail, but in Jesus our foes are already crushed and defeated for us. We know how to interpret our sufferings as purifying our faith and leading us to hope, and so we do not let the sufferings disrupt our subjective enjoyment of the objective peace between us and God.
The author of today’s Closing Hymn, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert was the son of a Lutheran pastor in the 18th century, and he himself invested four years of study to become a Lutheran pastor, but, afterwards he had to give up on the pastoral ministry. He could have despaired and opted, as so many middle‑aged, white Americans are apparently opting now, for suicide. But, no doubt Gellert knew, as we should know, that in Jesus there is always hope. In the world we will have tribulation, and in Jesus we also have peace, for He has overcome the world. Gellert, too overcame, later became an extraordinary philosophy professor, notably with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing among his students. We, too, can overcome, and we can make Gellert’s final words of today’s Closing Hymn our own:
Jesus lives! And now is death / But the gate of life immortal;
This shall calm my trembling breath / When I pass its gloomy portal.
Faith shall cry, as fails each sense / Jesus is my confidence! (Lutheran Worship 139:5)
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +