Church Established

Sermon Proper 16A 

Sunday August 21, 2011

Matthew 16:13-20

Rev. Jeff Springer

In our Gospel text this morning we come to a very important milestone in Jesus ministry.  Jesus establishes His church.  We have heard stories over the last week about little faith and we have also heard about great faith, but today the focus of the reading is on the object of faith, Jesus, who is the Christ the Son of the Living God. 

Does St. Peter get credit for answering Jesus’ question correctly?   Well no, Jesus says, “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”  Even though Peter says the words, Jesus gives the glory to the Heavenly Father. We do the same when we also confess, “I cannot believe by my own reason or strength in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith.”

We confess with Jesus that faith is not something we do, it is rather a teaching we receive. It is blasphemous for us to take credit for our faith.  In our case we receive the gift of faith from hearing the Gospel preached and taught. We also receive it through the visible gospel found in the washing of baptism, the absolution said by pastor and the consuming of Jesus body and blood. 

But I am a little ahead of myself.   At this point in Jesus life he has not yet instituted Christian Baptism or the Lord’s Supper. That is because He has not yet died on the cross and risen. However, Jesus does with establishment of His church, establish confession and absolution, the office of the keys.

Jesus ever since he asked the paralytic to get up and walk has had clashes with the Pharisees.  We find that these clashes will become more intense. Not because he cured the man but because He forgave His sins.  Forgiveness of sins is something only God can do.  For a man to do this would be assuming for himself a divine quality.  Jesus was accused of being a blasphemer and as you may recall from the passion that was the charge the Jewish leaders used to put Jesus to death.

The absolution, hearing the word’s your forgiven, that we may take for granted every Sunday was unheard of in the Old Testament Church.  Yes there were means and rituals used to gain forgiveness from God through the temple cult.  The sacrificing of animals staved off God’s wrath but it was never what God intended for the final solution. These sacrifices only pointed to the sacrifice that counted and that was Jesus on the cross.

Jesus is no mere man. God always intended to be the Savior of his people. He did not expect anyone else to do it.  Nor could anyone elses sacrifice suffice.  Jesus must be God for his work to count.  And so we come back to the confession of Peter.  “Jesus you are the Christ the Son of the living God!”  We are not talking about a man made idol but the living God, the God of the living who gives life.  Jesus is the resurrection and the life.

Jesus does not build his church on the person of Peter but on the confession the Father gave to Peter. A confession is saying the same thing as someone else or saying it together with someone.  This works when we sin where we confess or say along with the bible that we are sinners and when we confess that Jesus, Son of the Living God has bought me with His Holy and precious blood and innocent suffering and death and that he rose on the third day.

We on outset are a confessing church. We say what God’s Word says.  Jesus did not speak any more or any less what His Father gave him to say and through the work of the Holy Spirit those words have been preserved for us to hear , to pray and to tell others. 

So in summary the church is established on the inspired confession that Jesus of Nazareth born of Mary and conceived by the Holy Spirit is Son of the Living God and all that attends to it. This is what the church confesses.

What does the church do? It continues Jesus ministry of forgiveness.  It is in the church where we hear the absolution, the words, “I forgive you.” from Jesus through the voice of the Pastor.  We are reminded of our baptism and the promises that accompany it namely the forgiveness of sins , the gift of the Holy Spirit, Regeneration , faith to believe,  and robe of Christ’s righteousness.  Absolution forgives us are sins appealing to your baptism pointing you back to Jesus.

If we are to summarize the work of the church the bride of Christ, it is to confess Christ and give His forgiveness.

When critically looking at doctrines especially from non-Lutherans we need to ask. Is this about what I am doing or what Jesus is doing?  What does this have to do with Jesus? And what does this have to do with the forgiveness of sins?

We Lutherans seem to get confused when it comes to evangelism as if we are somehow inept when we are compared to our American Evangelical neighbors.  We hear news of Greg Laurie’s Harvest Crusade at Anaheim stadium with almost 40,000 participants and are almost envious of this perceived success. It makes us wonder why we cannot be as successful or popular or have the same level of financial support.

We want to be like them so in evangelism we adopt their methods and techniques as if Lutheran doctrine and practice contribute nothing.  Even this congregation has a history of looking over the fence.  Remember the D. James Kennedy  Evangelism Explosion? I found several copies in my office when I first came here.  I heard there was a Lutheranized version of the Evangelism Explosion but that is not what was used here.

American Evangelicalism leads with Christ dying for your sins but it ends with the focus on you and your works.  Listen to this quote describing Greg Laurie’s sermon on the prodigal son from the Anaheim Independent. “He related the Prodigal Son in the Bible; the son who wanted he inheritance “now” and wanted to sow his wild oats, which he did and then he saw the error of his ways and returned home to a loving Father who accepted him with open arms-likening that story to those in the audience whose lives were currently in despair- that a loving Father in Heaven-God would also accept them as they are, if they accept Christ into their lives and work to change their ways.”

Always beware when a preacher says “if” when he points you back to yourself and puts conditions on God’s forgiveness and your salvation.   

Will you hear confession and absolution in the spoken in the American Evangelical Church?  No, because if you are really a Christian you will stop sinning. Remember  God’s acceptance of you is conditional on you changing your ways, not sinning. If you sin then you have backslidden and you then need to recommit your life to Jesus by walking up to the altar and saying a recommitment prayer.  I guess because the first one didn’t take.

You may even get rebaptized since in these circles, it is not a gift with no expiration date, but an act of obedience on your part to witness your commitment to God. You are placed front and center and Jesus is in the background waiting for you dead in your sins and trespasses to make a move.  And you are calling Jesus on the cross a liar when he says, “It is finished!”  And the Holy Spirit one when through St. Peter he says,  “Baptism now saves.”

You are accepted by the Father because Jesus forgives your sins and because He gave you the righteousness He earned on the cross through the washing and regeneration of baptism. This is what we confess and this is what the bible teaches. 

I am saddened to hear reports of Lutheran pastors putting their parishioners, the sheep they have been entrusted with on busses, to go to these revivalistic events whether it be Greg Laurie or Billy Graham where they are asked to come forward and exchange Christ’s garment of righteousness given in baptism for the filthy rags of their works.  With such neglect it is no wonder there very little denominational loyalty.

Another source of confusion lies in how we tell others about Christ.  We have the sign in our parking lot as we drive off. “Tell everyone what he has done.”  As royal priests in the priesthood of believers, we go back to our homes and to our places of work and we tell others about Jesus.  What He has done not what we have done.

However the confusion comes again from the American Evangelicals who as part of their acts of obedience as a Christian, is to give a testimony.  Once again it is your action centered on you. You may say but I am called to be a witness for Christ? No. We confess what the actual eye witnesses of Jesus His evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and other Apostles said about Him.

 

Typically testimonies are all about what God has done in the person or subject’s life.  They talk about what a rotten sinner they were until they went to a Harvest Crusade and gave their life to Jesus and everything changed. They became healthy, wealthy and wise and overall a much better person. Perhaps they may even claim that their addictions or a sickness was cured.  They may say out of obedience to Christ they can now forgive their neighbor.  The person giving the testimony is an eye witness to events of his or her own life.

Now it is good for Christians to acknowledge and to see God’s providential care, in their lives but telling someone this message never saves the hearer.  It is not evangelical in the biblical meaning because this message does not save them from their sins, especially at the end of the talk if they point you to your own commitment and surrender to Christ instead of to Christ himself in Baptism.     

Rather the key to authentic biblical evangelism is confessing Christ and His works of salvation. If you are really serious about evangelism then confess Christ and what He did on the Cross and how he connects you to the cross through the sacraments and preaching.  Go find and dust off your catechism, pray it yourself and confess it with your family.  You could talk about Jesus in your life or you could talk about your life in Jesus. 

Rather than giving a personal testimony, would it not be evangelical to say, “ I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, delivered me and freed me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with silver and gold but with his holy and precious blood and with his innocent sufferings and death, in order that I may be his, live under him in his kingdom, and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, even as he is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.”

With this statement from the small catechism you are saying what scripture says about what Christ did to save you. You could follow this by saying to the hearer, “and Christ did this for you.”  Now you have said something that the Holy Spirit can use to convert and then you can point them to baptism where they receive this righteousness by saying that baptism effects forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and grants eternal salvation to all who believe, as the Word and promise of God declare. As recorded in Mark 16:16, our Lord Christ said, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.”  We confess in our creeds that we have one baptism for the remission of sins.

I know one pastor perhaps there are more that give out basic paper copies of the small catechism as missionary tracts.  The small catechism we confess is a correct exposition of the scriptures and a comprehensive summary of our faith. Evangelizing is confessing the faith.  In fact your tools for evangelism are the same tools you use in worship.  The scriptures which is the Word of God that norms our confession, our confessions as found in the Book of Concord of 1580 that are normed by the scriptures and our Hymn book where our confession is put into practice in Worship.  Another way of confessing the faith is through the singing of true Lutheran evangelical hymns. 

Still some hymns are better than others and use as priests need to learn to discern these things. Even though it made it into our hymnal, I would not use Amazing Grace.  Beside the fact that we had to remove the revivalistic verse with the dubious phrase, “the hour I first believed.” It does not talk about Jesus and it is more than a little ambiguous as to what grace means. The definition of grace changes if you are speaking to an American Evangelical or a Roman Catholic however between those two bodies the definition is closer than you think.  The ambiguity of confession makes it popular ecumenical hymn. Rather memorize a Paul Gerhardt hymn such as “All Christian Who Have Been Baptized”  for example that confesses original sin and points us to Christ and his work. The forgiveness of sins is central in this hymn. An act of evangelism may be to give your neighbor a copy of this service.

Jesus establishes his bride the church on the rock solid confession given by the Father to Simon Peter. He is the Son of the living God and that means He can give life to you and me.  He tells you that your sins are forgiven and this he does for you today through His bride the church. He gives to you certainty of salvation by His Word preached  and His sacraments received.  Now you are ready to “Go tell everyone what He has done!