The Commitment of Christ
Epiphany • Sermon • Submitted • 14:51
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· 34 viewsA sermon for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
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One of the things I look forward to doing, especially once we move here, is hiking in the area behind the church. I suppose I will see a lot of beautiful things in creation. Susan and I have done a fair amount of hiking, especially when we lived in Durham. There, we would hike a number of trails along the Eno River. It was so striking that I would take my camera sometimes.
Already, in walking up to the church building in the mornings, I am struck by the sun at this time of year, rising and backlighting the trees behind the burial grounds. I took a photo of that this week. It’s my check-in photo on Facebook this morning.
There have always been people in the world who have looked at the beauty of the earth and the glory of the skies, but never known the love which from our birth, over and around us lies.[1]
In the spring of 1863, Folliott Pierpont sat on a hilltop near Bath, England. His view of the countryside and the Avon River inspired him to write about God’s gifts in creation, as well as his gift of Christ. “For yourself, best gift divine, to the world so freely given, agent of God’s grand design, peace on earth and joy in heaven.”[2]
How did Folliott know about the creator of all this beauty? How, more to the point, did he know who this creator is, and what more he has given to us than the earth and skies? That is what we will explore today, but first, let us pray.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable unto you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer (Psalm 19:14). Amen
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Folliott Pierpont and everyone else who has ever lived may have looked at the Avon River and the spring countryside, and thought that some great being must have made it all. Some of the most beautiful pictures of nature I have ever seen, were ones that I actually read. Zane Grey’s depictions of the American West are stunning, and make me want to visit Arizona and southern Utah. The purple sage, the forlorn rivers, and the rainbow trails, must have made settlers, cowboys, native peoples, and even infamous gunmen gawk in wonder. Many of them, even if they didn’t know who God is, must have thought some great spirit was responsible for the Rainbow Bridge, let alone the deserts, forests, streams, lakes, mountains, canyons, and starry nights around the campfire.
We might do the same, leaving worship this morning. If suddenly, we forgot all we’ve been taught about God, we would, leaving this building, walk outside and see even the bare trees, and the bluebirds I notice every day darting between those trees, and silhouetted by the blue sky and white clouds floating by, and think that someone marvelous and great spirit had painted the scene.
But we could not know who this creator is. We might suspect that there is a creator, or great spirit, or god—or gods—behind it all. “What can be known about God is plain...because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”[3]
Part of the nature of divinity is the hiddenness of specifics—of personality and character. Some gods are capricious, some drunken, some lascivious. We cannot help assigning them human characteristics. Unless divinity reveals itself, we are left guessing. We cannot tell, simply from the enjoyment of nature, who God is. We cannot leap from “for the beauty of the earth” to “best gift divine” in order to understand the “agent of God’s grand design.” Someone must tell us. And in order for the revelation to be trustworthy and objective, that someone must be God himself.
We cannot perceive the absolute being of God through reason or tradition unless that tradition is anchored in the revelation of God. And so, our first lesson begins: “Do you not know? Do you not hear? Has it not been told you from the beginning?” (Isaiah 40:21)
I have heard too many people insist that God told them something. It’s usually something they want to do so badly that it must be God who told them. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Their feelings informed them, not God.
We have something similar in church too. “We’ve always done it that way.” But who told you to do it in the first place? Is it right to do? Is it godly? Generally, these types of things are rather harmless adiaphora, but they can also cause division in the body, because what we’ve always done can become dogma that is divorced from the Word and the Spirit of Christ.
We need a more reliable source than feelings and tradition, or even human reason. The only reliable source, certainly, is the Source. God must tell us about himself. And he does. As our Vespers service reminds us, “In previous times, God has spoken to us by the prophets. But now, in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son.”[4]
God has spoken to us through his Word. But we require proclaimers of his Word too—teachers and preachers and evangelists and missionaries—who are committed to the reading and proclamation of the gospel. Paul exhorted Timothy, “Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching.”[5] We need to read the Word privately, but we must also hear it read to us in the church, in the communion of saints. “Blessed is he who reads, and he who hears.”[6]
We need people who are devoted to reading and preaching. You will find me sometimes reluctant to go to another committee meeting, for this very reason. The Word must come first. Sometimes a day or two here and there must, by sudden necessity, be given over to the Word. Did not Jesus rise early and go out to a private place to be alone with his Father? The disciples clamored after him, reminding him that there’s work to be done. And Jesus’ response? Let’s go elsewhere to preach. We need pastors who are devoted to that kind of ministry, who have a proclamation outlook instead of a business mindset.
We also need people who are committed to having reading and proclamation done in the body. The church needs people like you who will search and search for someone to come to you and proclaim the Word. We need churches like St. Paul’s who have had something like two dozen people go out from here to become proclaimers. But we must renew that commitment, always looking for and praying for new Timothies among us, encouraging them from an early age.
We need this commitment because it is the pattern of Christ himself. In our gospel lesson, Jesus isn’t getting side-tracked by healings and feedings. He is committed to proclaiming the kingdom. That is why he came. He was anointed to bring good news to the poor in spirit, to bring peace to hearts broken by sin, and to proclaim liberty from captivity to sin and death. Healing and feeding—the things that we want—are testimony to the veracity of Christ’s preaching. What Jesus was committed to, make no mistake, was proclamation itself.
This is why he went off by himself to pray. Whenever he went off to pray, he was about to do something important in his ministry. In this instance of prayer, it was to shore up his “resolve to preach the gospel of the kingdom throughout Galilee.”[7] Jesus was committed to preaching the gospel. It is why he came. From time to time, being also man, he had to resolve through prayer to go out and proclaim the kingdom.
I understand this need to prayerfully resolve. Since you extended the call to me, I intended to use Monday mornings to write a sermon for the coming Sunday. That way, I’d have all week to let it simmer, coming back to it throughout the rest of the week to make edits and adjustments. Sounds like a good plan, doesn’t it? A good idea? Well, that’s exactly what it was: an idea. I haven’t been able to use a Monday morning for sermon writing yet.
It takes getting back to Mebane, a desolate place, as it were, to find the aloneness to write. But if you find me missing some Monday, and y’all send out a search party, maybe I’m just trying to be like Jesus. Maybe I’ve gone away to pray.
We can hope.
I want to be committed to preaching like Jesus. Maybe I won’t get to go throughout Galilee, or even Rowan County, but there are lots of opportunities here at St. Paul’s—in this pulpit and in classes and conversations—and on the Internet too. For example, “Reading the Bible with Luther” takes a daily commitment to pull it off. But those five-minute videos reach lots of people, sometimes a hundred or so a day, and other days 400 and 500 people are reached. Our live-streamed worship services, made possible by the commitment of folks in this congregation to get out the gospel, reach hundreds of folks. I don’t know how to interpret the numbers as to how many people the videos posted to our website actually reach. But that isn’t the point.
The numbers should not be our motivation. What should drive us is the desire to be as committed to proclamation as Jesus. He is our model. Are we praying like him, proclaiming like him—and depending on him?
If we are devoted to preaching the gospel, statistics don’t matter as much anyway. What matters is a trust in God to bless our efforts as he wills. So, when you pray today, “thy will be done,” be thinking about our proclamation of the Word. When you pray the Lord’s Prayer in your homes, slow down at the Third Petition and expand your prayer to asking God’s blessing on our resolve here to proclaim the gospel. Ask him to bless our Stephen Minister training, our Confirmation classes, our Bible studies and Sunday School classes. Ask him to bless our website and Facebook page, that their reach for the gospel would increase. There are more proclamation opportunities.
I am working with pastors of three other Lutheran congregations (Christiana, Union, and Salem) to have two week-long day camps late in July. I am working with even more Lutheran congregations in our county to have a joint evangelism effort this fall. Ask God to bless these plans, as they are nothing less than a resolve to preach the gospel like our Lord was committed to doing—and like our Lord is still committed to doing...through us.
May it be so. And may God be praised in the doing. Amen
[1] Folliott Sandford Pierpoint, “For the Beauty of the Earth,” 1864
[2] https://hymnary.org/text/for_the_beauty_of_the_earth
[3] Romans 1:19–20 ESV
[4] Lutheran Book of Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1978), 151
[5] 1 Timothy 4:13
[6] Revelation 1:3
[7] R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Mark’s Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1961), 86.