Notes

The Lord be with you!
I will sing of the steadfast love of the LORD, forever!

This is the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost and that phrase, I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord, is heard in our Introit.
That’s the psalm verses that we sing antiphonally, or back and forth, immediately after the preparatory confession and absolution. Now the Divine Service proper has begun, and these opening words help us begin to grasp the theme of the particular Sunday. The Introit also includes the curious phrase: Blessed are those who know the festal shout.
What is a festal shout? It is the opposite of a cry of mourning, and it is a communal praise response to the abundant mercy and grace of God who has come among us to bring His precious gifts for us. We praise Him gladly! We don’t consider it a chore to be in church! It fulfills the third Commandment when we don’t “despise preaching and His Word, but gladly hear and learn it,” as we say in the Catechism and repeat this week in the Collect for this Sunday. Let us pray:

Almighty God, by the working of Your Holy Spirit, grant that we may gladly hear Your Word proclaimed among us and follow its directing; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.

Jeremiah 28:5-9
God teaches His people to trust in His Word, even over the human word of the prophet He has sent. Mankind is prone to error, but the Word preserved for us in Holy Scripture is never wrong. The words of prophets who prophesy peace need to be tested, and if what they say actually takes place, then God has given a clear testimony that that prophet is a true spokesman for God. This came to its greatest fulfillment when Jesus came and died on the cross and rose from the dead, as the Creed confesses, “according to the Scriptures.”

Romans 7:1-13
When a woman’s husband dies, she is freed by the earthly contractual law to the late husband and is free if she should choose to marry another. Paul uses this case as an analogy to what has died in our previous condition, that of a born sinner, and what has been reborn in our new condition, that of baptized believer. It wasn’t God’s law that died or terminated when we believed in God’s grace. Instead, it was sin and the condemnation that we had earned because of our sin that has died, and we are free from its bonds in order to be united to Christ, the church’s true Bridegroom. Our sin hangs on to our flesh in such a way that we are constantly prone to sins of weakness, but we can be certain and confident that Christ has set us free from the wretched condemnation that our consciences feel. Though still miserable sinners, thanks to our Savior we are at the same time joyful saints!

Matthew 10:34-42
Jesus continues His extended speech on the cost of following Him. For three weeks we have seen how directly opposed this sinful world is to Jesus and those who are born of water and the Spirit in baptism into His eternal kingdom. It’s strange to hear Him, the Prince of Peace, say flatly, I have not come to bring peace, but a sword! The sword is the price of peace, just like we remind ourselves on days like Veterans Day: freedom isn’t free. It costs a great sacrifice, and there was no greater sacrifice than Christ’s own holy body given up in bloody death for our atonement, the payment necessary for forgiveness to take place. Even though the cost of following Jesus is great and can feel very steep to us at times, we have assurance of a reward—the reward not of our work or our believing, but the reward earned in our place by our Good Shepherd.

Here’s Hymn 685, stanza 2:
Let us suffer here with Jesus / And with patience bear our cross.
Joy will follow all our sadness; / Where He is, there is no loss.
Though today we sow no laughter, / We shall reap celestial joy;
All discomforts that annoy / Shall give way to mirth hereafter.
Jesus, here I share Your woe; / Help me there Your joy to know.

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

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost: June 28, 2020 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

Listen to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, as He says: “Do not suppose I have come to bring peace to the earth.” Someone forgot to tell that to the multitude of the heavenly host of angels when Jesus was born. It looks like they might have been mistaken when they announced to the shepherds in the field, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, goodwill to men.” Instead of that, you heard it right out of Jesus’ mouth in today’s reading, He said as clear as day that peace on earth just isn’t His thing.

Are you upset? Are you disappointed that you were led to understand that believing in Jesus was going to change your life for the better? Maybe at one time you were convinced that since God loves you, He wants you to be happy. That your family would be free of conflict. That your job would be secure and more than adequate. That your plans for education or retirement would be well-financed. That people would give you the respect you deserve. You tend to follow the desire of most American Christians who long for a God who believes in you, who takes you for who you are and blesses your life. You want your church-going experience to improve your attitude and outlook; you know, make you look on the bright side of everything. Develop a deep relationship with God and grow closer with other people who feel the same way you do. You are led to believe that these things are the best of what Jesus can offer to our hurt and broken world.

So Jesus simply is not helping His cause at all when He claims that He’s the cause of division and strife in this world. When your Lord claims not to bring peace but a sword, it appears to set back the success of the Christian Church and puts it farther from its goal of reaching out. Jesus, are you sure you want to identify yourself with the violent protesters we see on TV? If you are worldly-wise, you know already that it’s best to “choose your battles.” Don’t go out and ruin your prospects by nit-picking over details. Someone should tell Jesus what a grave mistake He’s making. Someone should rush the latest survey results straight to the Son of God so that He stops all this talk about tearing up homes and families. People want peace! It’s a very appealing and popular message. They’ll pay handsomely for it, and they’ll even come to Church to get it. Leave well enough alone. You’ve got plenty of the Bible that you can use to say what you want, and then just ignore the rest of the Bible that seems to contradict it.

But suppose for a moment that Jesus is not making a mistake. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that He isn’t the bad guy, and that all this division, violence and strife He’s causing is really for your good. If that is true, then the peace of God is different from the kind of peace that you have in mind. If a family is at peace, without any contention or division, and yet at the same time does not have Jesus, then whatever peace that family does have is false and misleading. God is not blessing them, rather, the devil is deceiving them. And he may be deceiving you. It’s easy to fall for. It’s easy to have false peace. It’s tempting to make false peace as if it were the kind of peace that Jesus was sent from heaven to win for the world. But Jesus simply won’t let you do that. There’s too much at stake. Your eternal salvation is more important to Him than your temporary comfort in a pleasant state of false peace. Your heavenly destination takes greater precedent than your worldly success. “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

And boy, can that sword hurt. It stings with the rejection and dirty looks that you may get because of your faith. Ask anyone from the Sudan or any veteran who’s done a tour in the Middle East how bloody the sword of persecution can be. And yet the Christians suffering in these areas are perhaps the ones with the strongest faith in the world today. In your own family, perhaps it may come up that a couple is living together without the protection and Divine blessing of marriage. You thought they were raised better than that, but you hold your tongue because you don’t want to start a fight. It’s not my place, so you reason with yourself, while the whole time God’s command as well as His promise of blessing remains ignored and despised. Your kids resist coming with you to church. It gets harder and harder to make it happen like it did when they were small. So you relent and give in to them for the sake of peace at home and rationalize that the Church isn’t giving them what they like anyway.

If that’s the peace you want, then you aren’t going to get it from Jesus. For the peace of God, the peace that passes all understanding, is a peace that hurts like the sword. It hurts you because it also hurt your Lord. It cut into His hands and feet, bleeding with every blow of the hammer to those spikes on the cross. The peace of God ripped open His side with the centurion’s spear, so that the cleansing flood would wash away your sins and offenses. This peace divides the church because after all it was a group of church leaders and teachers that pushed for the passion of the Christ in the first place. This peace even divides you within yourself, as St. Paul describes of his own Christian life in the Epistle: “What I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, that’s what I do.” The victorious life on this side of heaven doesn’t always look so victorious!

For though you have often rejected God and His peace in favor of your own, though you have done wrong against your neighbor and your family, you have the promise of God’s true peace because the blood of Jesus paid the price for you to get it. The Prince of Peace doesn’t promise you the success and creature comforts that false peace offers to you, but He does guarantee suffering now, and glory later in heaven. This isn’t to say that if you aren’t going through strife and struggle right at the moment, that you should go out of your way to pick a fight. No, like any good soldier, always be prepared to fight, but stay true to your orders laid out in God’s Word, remain faithful to Him in whatever your vocation is, and let your Almighty General Jesus choose the battles.

Give thanks that your Lord and Savior came to bring you not the worldly peace you want, but the heavenly peace that you need. Realize that it is for your good that the worship of the church is not merely entertaining and attention-grabbing, but instead it is a solid deliverer of the precious, divine gift of forgiveness. Be grateful that you have not empty success at home, school, work or church, but rather the painful sword and cross to bear in your life. For although Jesus has destroyed the false peace that you had at one time come to love and cherish, He replaces it with the real peace that the world cannot give, a peace that is sealed with this promise from the Prince of Peace: “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Dear children of God, you have already in your baptism lost your life for the sake of Christ. Welcome to true peace.

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

Readings:
Jer. 28:5–9 The prophets who have been before me and before you of old prophesied…
Psalm 119:153–160 Revive me according to your word
Rom. 7:1–13 sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire
Matt. 10:34–42 he who loses his life for my sake will find it