Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download the audio.
+ + + 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.
Advent is, as I have noted previously, a season of repentant preparation for Jesus’s comings to us, not only the celebration of His past coming in humility and the anticipation of His future coming in glory, but also the realization of His coming to us now, also somewhat “humbly”, through His Means of Grace. His “Means of Grace” are, at least primarily, His “Word and Sacraments”, with “Sacraments” understood as God’s Word combined at His command with things that we can feel, see, and taste and by which we receive blessings such as the forgiveness of sins. In our special series on the Lord’s coming to us now through His Means of Grace, we have previously focused on “The Read and Preached Word” and “The Sacrament of Holy Baptism”, and tonight we focus on what can be called “The Sacrament of Holy Absolution”.
There is an inextricable connection between God’s redeeming all people through the death of His Son Jesus Christ on the cross, the faith that God gives to us that receives the forgiveness Jesus paid for on the cross, and the Office of the Holy Ministry’s reading and preaching the Word and handing out the Sacraments. Through those in the Office of the Holy Ministry, what can also be called the Office of the Keys, preaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments, God gives the Holy Spirit, Who creates faith, which receives God’s forgiveness through those same Means of Grace (Augsburg Confession V:1). Any such reception of God’s forgiveness through the Office of the Keys so broadly understood can be considered “absolution” also in a broad sense of that word “absolution”, although, based solidly on Holy Scripture, our Lutheran Confessions generally use the word “absolution” more narrowly, as a technical term, referring to that forgiveness that an individual receives from his or her pastor, usually after making either a general or a specific confession of sins, regardless of whether the confession and the absolution are done publicly or, more commonly, privately.
The Additional Psalm that we used tonight (Psalm 32; antiphon v.5) and tonight’s three Readings (Isaiah 22:15-25; Revelation 3:7-13; and Matthew 16:13-20) are important parts of the Biblical background and solid basis for the Office of the Keys and absolution more-narrowly understood and used. Quoted at least in part by the Divinely-inspired St. Paul in Romans, as our Sunday Adult Bible Class has discussed recently, the Additional Psalm describes sinners’ not covering up but acknowledging and confessing their iniquity and transgressions and so the Lord’s “covering” that sin by forgiving that sin, as the Psalmist David would have experienced through the ministry of Nathan (2 Samuel 12:1-13). The First Reading uses “the key of the house of David” and other implements to describe the transfer of authority from Shebna to Eliakim, who at least for a time would faithfully use that authority of the king for the benefit of the people, opening what no one could shut and shutting what no one could open, though eventually Eliakim would fail and that authority ultimately would go to another (confer Isaiah 9:6). In the Second Reading, the Son of Man, our Lord Jesus Christ, in that Davidic line and with that and greater authority, is that “other” Who has the key of David and who opens and no one will shut and who shuts and no one will open (confer Revelation 1:18), and, recognizing that the pastor of the Church in the ancient city of Philadelphia is perceived as having little power, He, Who imparts eternal life to others, promises that he and the faithful in that congregation eventually will be vindicated. And, in the Third Reading, Jesus promised Simon Peter, as representative of the Twelve, that Jesus would give Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and elsewhere the Gospel accounts report Jesus’s similarly promising and eventually giving those “keys” to the Twelve, as it were (Matthew 18:18‑20; John 20:21-23; confer Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope ¶22-30).
Now I will readily admit that, when I was instructed before my Confirmation, like many of you, I was not taught that any kind of absolution was a Sacrament, and so I was, like some of you may be, somewhat reluctant to change my understanding, until the Holy Spirit worked through Holy Scripture, the Lutheran Confessions, and others’ expounding them to convince me that there was such a thing as a Sacrament of Holy Absolution and that that Sacrament was not what generally happened with the whole congregation before a Divine Service but was what took place usually with an individual who made either a general or a specific confession of sins to his or her pastor privately. Some resistance or reluctance to change can be good, but I thank God that He gave me an open mind and heart for that change in understanding, as I pray that He gives that same open mind and heart to others for the same change in understanding. Even now I remain open to correction on this matter, not correction based on a brother pastor’s personal opinion, but correction based on Holy Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions, which I have vowed will norm my preaching and practice, and to which you all have somewhat similarly subscribed by your membership in this congregation.
Even the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s Brief Explanation of the Small Catechism, which is usually a textbook of sorts for instruction before Confirmation, has changed over the years on this matter of Absolution as a Sacrament, drawing closer to the understanding of Holy Scripture expressed by the Lutheran Confessions. Two of those confessional writings, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther’s Large and Small Catechisms, themselves changed within a year or more of their initial publications, to include respective treatments of Confession and Absolution alongside the Sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. Subsequent confessional writings included articles dedicated to such things as Confession and Absolution and to the number of the Sacraments, which articles make clear the Lutheran confessors understood there to be three Sacraments, even when at times they might refer to only two (for example, compare Large Catechism IV:1 and 74). Notably, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther’s Smalcald Articles describes the surpassing richness of God’s grace in offering counsel and help against in more than one way, including through the power of keys (Smalcald Articles III:iv) and confession and absolution, what he there explicitly calls “individual” or “private absolution”, and describes as “derived” from the Office of the Keys, saying its mutual conversation of confession and its consolation of absolution should not be neglected but be highly esteemed and valued (Smalcald Articles III:viii:2; confer III:iv, vii:1, and viii:1).
Why, then, do so many people neglect the Sacrament of Holy Absolution and hold it in low esteem and de-value it? Are individual confession and absolution neglected because they are misperceived as too Roman Catholic? The Roman Catholic and Confessional Lutheran teachings and practices of confession and absolution are in fact quite different (confer Pieper, III:192-193). Are individual confession and absolution neglected because we think that only God knows a person’s heart and can forgive sins? While both of those things are true enough in some sense, those men whom God calls and ordains can work from what people say and those men are in fact sent with Christ’s authority (confer Matthew 9:8; Pieper, III:194-196). Are individual confession and absolution neglected because, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests, we deceive ourselves with our confession of sin to God and what Bonhoeffer describes as self-absolution (Life Together, 138)? Bonhoeffer rightly says that in some sense we should be more willing to confess to a sinful man than to the Holy God! Are individual confession and absolution neglected because we are too Reformed in our thinking, thinking that the Holy Spirit works apart from men and external means? In discussing private absolution, the Lutheran Confessions say that God gives no one His Spirit or grace except through the external Word and Sacrament, and that whatever is attributed to the Spirit apart from such Word and Sacrament is of the devil (Smalcald Articles III:viii:3-13). Ultimately individual confession and absolution are neglected because by nature we are sinful and despise preaching and His Word in all of its forms, breaking the Third Commandment and all the other Commandments like it, deserving death here and now and torment in hell for eternity, unless, enabled by God, we repent.
When we repent, then God forgives us. God forgives us of our sin of neglecting confession and absolution and all of our other sins, whatever those sins might be. God forgives us not because we have confessed, as if our confession is the cause of our forgiveness, but God forgives us by grace for the sake of the bitter suffering and death on the cross of His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. God forgives us, we can say, when we repent, with repentance as a sort of necessary condition. Yet, even when we cannot be absolutely certain about our contrition, renewal, or any other subjective state of worthiness, we can be absolutely certain about God the Father’s love and mercy that led to Christ’s reconciling us with Him (Pieper, III:195-196). Because of Jesus’s death on the cross for us and His resurrection from the grave, Heaven not only is open to us but we also know that Heaven is open to us (confer Lutheran Service Book 357:5).
Jesus Who Himself quite publicly forgave individuals’ sins—such as those of a paralyzed man (Matthew 9:2-8), a notoriously sinful woman (Luke 7:36-50), and the penitent thief on the cross (Luke 23:39-43)—in turn sent out His apostles and their successors similarly to forgive the sins of individuals (John 20:21-23; confer Pieper, III:191). The Lutheran Confessions understand Sacraments to apply the Gospel to believers individually, including individual or private absolution, which we believe as if we had heard a voice from heaven and so benefit from it (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration XI:37-38, citing Apology of the Augsburg Confession XI:2 from the German; confer AC XXV:3; Small Catechism V:6; Pieper, III:197-199). Confession is always for the sake of the absolution, so much so that the terms “confession” and “absolution” are almost used interchangeably in the Lutheran Confessions (confer Scaer, CLD VIII:118 n.10). And, even definitions of “sacrament” that indirectly or directly demand a visible element are satisfied when the rite of absolution itself is understood as entering one’s eyes to move one’s heart (Apology of the Augsburg Confession XIII:5) or when the pastor’s hand on the individual’s head is understood as the visible element (for example, Luther, AE 58:111).
The Sacrament of Holy Absolution rightly finds its place, as the Office Hymn in part described it (LSB 616), between the Baptismal Font and the Altar Rail. The baptized who are instructed and examined in individual confession and then individually absolved are admitted to the Altar and its Rail (for example, Apology to the Augsburg Confession XV:40). We do not need to be compelled to confess for the sake of absolution, but rather, the Large Catechism says, we are glad to run 100 miles and compel pastors to hear our confession—not our confession of all our sins, for that is impossible (Psalm 19:12), but our confession of the sins that we know and feel in our heart and so the sins that particularly trouble us (Large Catechism, “Brief Exhortation”, ¶30). Christ gave the Sacrament of Holy Absolution for us and for our benefit, because our souls need it: Christ’s individual absolution’s indicating and effecting forgiveness through a pastor is not necessarily “more certain” than a layperson’s “word of forgiveness” or the forgiveness worked through the pastor by another Means of Grace, but we might say that we sinners can more easily realize that absolution applies to us as individuals through the Sacrament of Holy Absolution than through, for example, sermons (Pieper, III:209). As an individual sinner-saint, I have been blessed through the Sacrament of Holy Absolution, and I cannot too much encourage you also to be so blessed.
One of the L-C-M-S’s founders, C-F-W Walther, once wrote that, where private absolution had fallen into disuse, pastors should work toward the goal that it be reintroduced and eventually be the exclusive practice of their congregations (Pastoral Theology, Drickamer edition, 120). Let us thank God that by His grace private absolution is the exclusive practice here at Pilgrim; let us pray that He so preserves its use among us and that those few who seek the Sacrament of Holy Absolution continue to do so and that more do likewise, not only during this penitential season of Advent but always; and let us trust that, no matter the low regard others give the practice, as with the Church in the ancient city of Philadelphia, the practice ultimately will be vindicated by the Lord.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +