Notes

The Lord be with you!
In God I trust, I shall not be afraid; What shall man do to me?
Happy Father’s Day! In addition to giving us our earthly fathers, God has been to us a tender Father, source of life and our true protector unto everlasting life!

This is also the Third Sunday after Pentecost and in our three-year lectionary series, we are moving through both the theologically rich Epistle to the Romans and the extensive teachings of Jesus recorded by the Evangelist Matthew. These books follow a certain order, whether it’s a logical progression of thought or a context that helps teach the faith as it follows the historical life of our Lord. Either way, we gain a benefit this year from going straight through these important New Testament books.

Let us pray the Collect for this Sunday:
O God, because Your abiding presence always goes with us, keep us aware of Your daily mercies that we may live secure and content in Your eternal love; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.

Jeremiah 20:7–13
You may recall the account of the patriarch Jacob wrestling with a strange man in the middle of the night. He later realized that he was wrestling with God, looking at Him straight in the face, and yet Jacob was not destroyed for being an unclean sinner. Jeremiah, several centuries later, also wrestles with God in words: “Lord, you have deceived me! You have prevailed over me for you are stronger than I.” Jeremiah wants to keep quiet about God’s words, but they burn within him like an unquenchable fire that forces him to speak the truth. But the words are no longer violence and destruction, but words of hope for God’s weary people.

Romans 6:12–23
Freedom and slavery are very common themes in the Bible, and in our strange times today, those terms can be clouded or even grossly misunderstood. Sin has an unmerciful dominion over mankind and the fallen world. We were born under its thumb, with no hope of escape by our own reason or strength. Our slavery to impurity only led to more and more sin and lawlessness. Christ our Lord appeared, and willingly offered Himself to death on the Cross in order to secure our liberty. Now that we are free, it would simply not do to offer to place ourselves back on the block to be sold into slavery again to the master we have just escaped! Instead, our slavery is of an entirely new kind- to serve God and our neighbor for the sake of the righteousness that Jesus earned for us and has given us. This is the slavery that leads to holiness and, ultimately, our eternal life.

Matthew 10: 21–33
Persecution is a given for all who follow Jesus. Animosity against the Gospel will even threaten the closest earthly bonds of the family. What an encouraging message for Father’s Day, right? But with the sobering reality comes the truly uplifting promises from Christ’s lips: the one who endures to the end will be saved. Do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Those who acknowledge me before men, I will also acknowledge before my Father. These are the higher realities with which we are blessed, and no earthly, temporary persecution can ever stamp them out.

With constant distractions, fears and worldly idols, we fall prey to the temptation to doubt that God’s abiding presence always goes with us in our sojourn through this life. Christ’s free gift of forgiveness and everlasting life through His Word, Baptism and His Body and Blood keeps us aware of His daily mercies that He has kept in store for us, so that in Him we live secure and content in God’s eternal love.

Here’s Hymn 863, stanza 1:
Our Father, by whose name All fatherhood is known,
Who dost in love proclaim Each family Thine own,
Bless Thou all parents, guarding well, With constant love as sentinel,
The homes in which Thy people dwell.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost: June 21, 2020 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

“Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.” Come on, Jesus! It’s Father’s Day! Where are your words of appreciation? Don’t we have enough of the Violence and Destruction that even Jeremiah complained about 2600 years ago? No, sin and the curse of this world are still up to the same old playbook. Now they do it on 24 hour news channels and you can see its full evil display on your own handheld screens loaded with Twitter and Facebook. Violence and destruction even engulf whole portions of modern cities and the police are made out to be the bad guys even when they’re doing good. For about three months, we were fighting the microscopic coronavirus with staying home, “we’re all in this together” and helping one another in heartfelt ways. Now the last three weeks all that love and camaraderie seem to melted away. All the more we need Jesus to talk about this persecution that comes our way from our evil world. All the more we need the words we heard from Jesus today in our Gospel: “Everyone who acknowledges Me before men, I also will acknowledge before My Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies Me before men, I also will deny before My Father who is in heaven.”

Think of our Lutheran Fathers—this week we have the 490th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, June 25, 1530—those bold laymen knew on that important day that now was the time for them to acknowledge Jesus Christ and His true message of forgiveness in front of the most powerful man in the land, the Holy Roman Emperor. If they were to shrink back at that time, then they would be turning their back on their Lord, and that was not going to happen; their eternal salvation meant too much to them to put it at risk. Satan and his angry mob were ready to do their worst, and most of them felt it very much.

They also heard the very comforting word of Jesus: Have no fear of them. That means, those things the world throws at you to scare you—don’t allow them to steer you off course even one degree. Be bold! Be courageous! It will not be popular at times to believe in Jesus—so what? You have Him at your side; You have His strength bolstering your heart; there’s nothing else that could be better. The hairs of your head are all numbered, which means that God’s careful watch and loving concern cover every last detail of your life, how much more will He be concerned over the greater, more significant problems you will have to face!

As easy as this is to say and to believe, especially since you are sitting here and listening to it as a very familiar statement you might’ve heard many times, it is immensely challenging to keep reminding yourself about this truth. What happens to you when you get rocked with difficulty? What happens when the temptations of this world lure you away from what our Lord has clearly said? Do you fear that you will not have enough of what you are told that you need? Life will certainly be much easier for you if you were to say: you live the way you want, I will live the way I want. Later on, God will sort all this stuff out. Keep me out of it. I’ll just worry about myself.

Think about this: No matter what political party you like, I’m certain there has been a time or two when you have thought, or perhaps even shouted to the TV at one of our elected representatives in government, saying something like this: Just do the right thing! Stop worrying about where this is going to get you in the polls or the next election! Forget about pleasing the people who had nothing to do with electing you! I’m tired of these men and women of principles throwing those values out the window once they get elected to office!

You may think yourself the last person to get affected by politics, but I must point out to you—those things that drive you crazy about politicians—that same thing’s inside your own human nature too. You have acted as if you and your needs and desires were more important than what God has given you. You have used the free forgiveness of your sins to mean that you can keep on doing those sins that give you the satisfaction you crave. I can keep living like this, just as long as I keep asking for forgiveness, it’s okay. Or your moments of worry and anxiety, however momentary that they were, still they shook up your total reliance on Jesus your Savior and you let fear of men cancel out your love for Him. A mere moment where you might feel uncomfortable in this life seemed worse to you than an eternity without the Lord your Life giver. You know that whenever you did, thought, or spoke that way, you sinned against God in thought, word, or deed. Just like that frustrating politician, you deserve a shakeup of your senses in which God’s Law shouts at you: Do the right thing!

But fear not, nor fret! When you could not do the right thing out of fear of this world, Jesus did, and He did it all for you. He gave you the calm and patient assurance that spoke deep to your soul: you are of more value to Him than many sparrows. He has rescued you from the utter Divine wrath that had every right to destroy your soul and body in hell. Jesus suffered that destruction for you when He was on the cross dying for you. As we read today in Romans, you are not slaves to sin and fear anymore. You are slaves of righteousness, meaning you now have the freedom to love God perfectly because Jesus, who is in you, He already loves God perfectly. By the free gift that your Savior earned for you, you have eternal life and it will be your highest joy to give yourself in love for the good of your neighbor.

You will find that you have no love for the world and its empty promises. There is no longer a tug at your heart to try to please the people and things that try to be your God, but are nothing like Him. Yes, it will still be tough in these last days before Jesus returns at the End of the world. Brother will hand over brother into death, and father his child, children will rise up against parents and put them to death. Even the closest earthly relationships will try to get in the way of you and Jesus, but evil will not win this victory over you.

Instead, you have delivered one another, including children and parents, into a different kind of death. You are all killed in your sinful nature through Baptism! Sin doesn’t reign in your mortal bodies, because it was crucified with Christ. Parents, you have brought your children to the font to drown the sinner in them and they have been brought back to life as fellow believers. Brothers and sisters in Christ, here in the sight of God and one another, we have through confession of our sins handed our sinful selves into destruction, so that Christ our Lord will then make us a mighty Church, bold with the same faith that they had in Germany with Father Martin Luther at the lead over 500 years ago. It means too much to you to think otherwise.

As it was true with our Lutheran forefathers of long ago, Christ will also acknowledge you before the Father who is in heaven. Why? Because you believe the Gospel Word that has forgiven you all your sins. When you say Amen to that forgiveness, when you trust that all Divine gifts are yours as an inheritance, you are also confessing that Jesus is your Lord, and nothing else evil that happens to you in this world measures up in any way or form to what good lies in store for you. Now is the time to be brave and bold! In Christ you will do the right thing without regard for the hatred of the world, because Christ did the right thing—the saving thing for you that would secure your everlasting life.

In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Readings:
Jer. 20:7–13 His word was in my heart like a burning fire
Psalm 91:1–16 You shall not be afraid of the terror by night
Rom. 6:12–23 do not let sin reign in your mortal body … the wages of sin is death
Matt. 10:5a, 21–33 you will be hated by all for My name’s sake