[Sermon Archive]

This Week's Sermon Fourth Midweek Lenten Vespers 21 March 2007 "Truly Rejoicing" LSB Series C Vicar Hans W. Fiene Soli Deo Gloria!

Today is the first day of spring. And though this year it's actually starting to get warm, there have been many years recently when it's still snowing around this time, inspiring in me a great desire to move to a place like San Diego, California where the average temperature never drops below 60°. But as much as I suppose it might be nice to live in an area where you never have to shovel a driveway or warm up your car for 20 minutes in the morning, I do think that a climate like that of southern California can have an adverse effect on people. You see, when you don't have a long period of the year when it's just cold and nasty and gray and miserable and all the earth is just dead, you'll never really understand what it means to rejoice over everything coming back to life. When you never suffer through the winter, you'll never know how instrumental that suffering is in rejoicing over the spring. And I think it's pretty safe to say that failing to understand the role of suffering and hardship in a seasonal sense can often times spill over into other categories, specifically where people then fail to understand the role of suffering in a theological sense.

Now I'm not saying that this mindset is an inevitable result of living in a warm climate environment. I'm not saying that you can't be an orthodox Lutheran and live by the beach. But it is fairly common in climates such as this to see the Christian faith advertised as nothing more than a club where friendly people get together to talk about how wonderful life is. In fact, I've even seen a few websites of LCMS congregations in Southern California, near the beach, that encourage people to come to their services in Hawaiian shirts and flip flops-attire appropriate for their style of worship where they just sort of kick back, relax and talk about how wonderful God is.

Even though here in the Midwest there are probably not many, if any, congregations inviting you to wear Hawaiian shirts to the divine service, even though winter can certainly last for quite some time here in Terre Haute, we do still need to be careful that we don't adopt the mindset found often in places like California-a mindset that only wants to deal with sunny, happy thoughts and that views any talk of God's anger as something cold and dreary, not at all conducive to making people feel good-exactly what people are trying to achieve when they want Easter without Lent. Such a mindset fails to understand the importance of Lent, this liturgical season when we contemplate the death found in our sinfulness as a way of preparing for our deliverance into the life found Christ's resurrection. And Lent is vastly important in understanding the Resurrection. Because just as you can't really rejoice over the spring if you haven't endured the winter, you can't really sing praises to the LORD without recognizing why you're praising Him.

When I was in seventh grade I got into some pretty serious trouble for something that I did at school. And when I had finished that long walk home and stood just outside our front door, I knew there was nothing I could do to escape my parents' anger. Now, I didn't do this at the time, but if I had sort of burst through the door and begun lavishly singing their praises, telling them how much I loved them, my parents wouldn't have been fooled. There was no way I could have diverted their anger with my praises. I'm sure if any of you have ever gotten into serious trouble with your parents, it'll be obvious to you that this plan wouldn't work at all.

As foolish of a thing as this would be to do in front of our parents, it's amazing how frequently we adopt the same plan with God. Even though our sins have angered God far more than they could ever anger our parents, and even though God can see into our hearts even better than our parents ever could, we still expect Him to be so impressed by our expressed love for Him that He forgets His anger and no longer pays attention to the sins that caused His anger in the first place. Believing that God's anger will no longer exist if we just ignore it and sing His praises instead is just as foolish as believing that closing our eyes and listening to the Beach Boys greatest surfing songs will somehow melt the snow on the ground. And when we crave that endless summer, when wrap ourselves in this sort of Southern California "everything is great" mindset as a means to avoid looking at our sins, we'll never truly fear God's anger. And when we never truly fear God's anger, we'll never be able to truly rejoice in God's mercy through Christ.

Because sin is entirely contrary to God, when we commit sin we are standing in and living in the state that is defined by its hatred of God. And on account of this, we are completely separated from God's love and favor. If God is the warmth and comfort and life that we see in spring, we are locked us outside the cold and bitterness and death that is sin. And as long as God's anger remains, this winter of our discontent will never end. So the question is, if God has taken us out of the land of sin, stuck in the perpetual death of winter, and has placed us back into the warmth and light that is His love, how did we get here? Isaiah doesn't say that God's anger has ceased to exist. He says that God's anger has turned away. Turned away where?

Isaiah actually gives the answer in the previous chapter of this book. In chapter eleven, Isaiah describes the stump of Jesse-a prophecy concerning Christ. In this chapter, Isaiah describes this perfect, sinless one of Israel, who shall have the spirit of the Lord rest upon him, who will judge in all righteousness and be filled with absolute faithfulness. It's in this chapter that we have those famous verses about the wolf dwelling with the lamb and the infant playing over the hole of the cobra-an allusion to the restoration of God's perfect creation and the powerlessness of Satan over mankind. The praises that come in chapter twelve, in today's chapter, are born from that restoration. And that restoration of creation and the defeat of Satan come when God's anger turns away from us and then turns toward Christ-that perfect, holy stump of Jesse.

While focusing on God's anger toward sinners may be a buzz kill for people who only want to focus on God's love, the truth is that God's love exists side by side with His anger. And when you follow the direction of God's anger, there you will find not just a perfect image of God's love. You'll actually find God's love itself in the Crucified Christ. By giving up his life for us, Christ has left His dwelling place in the sinless spring and has entered into the dead winter of sin. And when the Father emptied His anger upon Christ, God Himself received the punishment that we deserved. God brought death upon Himself so that He could return life to a world that could never have it otherwise.

For those of you who've lived in Indiana for a few years, you may have noticed that we often get what I like to call the fake of week of spring. It usually comes about early March are maybe even late February where, after months of temperatures in the 20s and 30s, it suddenly skyrockets up into the seventies. And then as soon as you start to revel in the spring, you wake up the next morning and you've been blasted by another snowstorm. After this happens a few times, you stop trusting in that warm weather. And as much as you may enjoy the aesthetics of it, as much as you may enjoy the way the sunlight bounces off the pavement or the feel of the warmth on your skin, you just don't trust that the winter is gone for good. That same kind of lack of trust is what we get when we want to speak about God's love without ever speaking about his anger. The words may sound pretty, but they don't really mean anything if we can't be certain that God's anger isn't going to come back.

But in the cross of Christ, we have the promise that God's anger has turned away from us and has poured out upon his perfect, beloved Son. In the death of Christ, we have the promise that Jesus has consumed the entire cup of wrath. And in the resurrection of our Lord, we have the promise that God's anger has been put to death along with all of our sins that warranted that anger. And so when Christ pours upon us the water from the wells of His salvation in our baptism, that is the moment when we receive the gifts of Christ's life and death. That is the moment when we come to understand what it truly means to rejoice. Once, we were enemies of God but now we are His children. Once we cursed God's name and hid from His anger but now we sing His praises through the mercy of His Son. Once, we were lost in sin but now we have been found by Christ's grace. Once, we were dead in the frigid winter but now we live in the warmth of spring. And because Christ destroyed death in His death and resurrection, that winter will never return. Rejoice.