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This Week's Sermon The Fourth Sunday of Easter 29 April 2007 "The Gospel Isn't Math" John 10:22-30 LSB Series C Vicar Hans W. Fiene Soli Deo Gloria!

When I was in school, I never really liked math very much. I suppose there were many reasons for this, but the main one was that math deals with right and wrong answers. I suppose I kind of resented the fact that I could pour my blood, sweat and tears into a complex math problem for an hour and, despite all my hard work and sincerity, I'd still get an answer that was completely wrong.

Now, I suppose the Word of God is similar to math in that it also deals with right and wrong answers. With the question "how many gods are there?" there's a right answer and a wrong answer, just as there is with the question, "Is Jesus Christ the Son of God?" So, in this sense, the Gospel seems to be a mathematical kind of thing. And there are actually many people who believe that God's kingdom will grow if you just teach unbelievers to do a kind of theological math or if you just give them the proper information to plug into the equation.

If you've ever gotten one of those "are you saved?" type tracts that people hand out, you may have noticed that they're presented in a mathematical kind of way. They'll have a few pieces of information such as: 1. you are a sinner and 2. Jesus died to save sinners. And then, once you add those two things up, you'll reach the righteous answer that Jesus is your savior.

But the problem with this approach is that the Gospel isn't math. Certainly, there are some people in the world who have never heard the name Christ. But as for the vast majority of unbelievers in our general area, the reason for their unbelief isn't because they don't have the pieces of information or don't know how to add them together. The reason they don't believe is the same reason that the Jews who approached Christ in today's text didn't believe-because they are not a part of His flock. And in the same way, those who do believe do so not because they're extremely smart or very good at adding pieces of information together and drawing the right conclusion. The reason believers believe is because they are a part of Christ's flock.

Now, if being a sheep of Christ hinged on how smart or trained you were, the makeup of Christ's disciples would have looked quite a bit different. Instead of a rag tag group composed primarily of a bunch of fishermen, Christ's followers would have been the elite and sophisticated of society. The Pharisees and scribes were the best educated and trained people of Christ's day. If we're sticking with this math metaphor, these guys were supposed to be the Archimedes and Einsteins of the Old Testament. There was no one more highly versed in the Scriptures, no one with more training and expertise in studying God's Word. If there was anyone who should have been smart enough to see from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ, it was them. But they couldn't see it-just as so many of the Jews in today's text who followed the Pharisees way of thinking couldn't see it. So despite everyone's familiarity with Judaism, despite the fact that they had all the information staring them in the face, they couldn't do the theological math necessary to conclude that Christ was the Son of God. To use Christ's language, they couldn't hear the voice of the Shepherd.

So why was this extensive education and training fruitless for these people? Well, it all stems from the nature of unbelief. You see, unbelief isn't really born from ignorance. Unbelief is born from sin. It's man's sinful nature that causes Him to reject the truths of God. And while smarts can be an extremely valuable thing in many areas of life, the one thing the intellect can never do is outsmart our sinful nature.

Our sinful nature hates the idea that we are sinners in need of God's salvation. And there is no kind of intelligence that can graduate us past our hatred of Christ. In fact, man's sinful nature will often use his intelligence to amplify his hatred of the Gospel. We certainly see this throughout the Gospels when the Pharisees are constantly trying to expose Jesus as a fraud by fooling Him with tricky scriptural questions. And we also see it very frequently today in the various forms of intelligence that people have.

Some of you may have friends or family members or coworkers who are unbelievers. And if you've ever tried to discuss the Christian faith with them, you may have noticed that their rejection of the faith often stems from their own specific area of intelligence of training. Some people who are highly educated in science use their understanding of nature's laws to reject God's ability to work outside of those laws through Scripture's miracles. Some people who understand history very well will point out various similarities to Christianity found in religions throughout the world and conclude that Christ is just a sort of cultural assimilation of various old world myths.

And if we're honest with ourselves, we'll see that our old sinful nature often jabs at our faith by using our intellects against us. When we doubt that it's possible for the Cross to be brought to us through our pastor's word of forgiveness, our sinful nature is using our understanding of the limits of space and time as a way of rejecting the Gospel. When we doubt that Christ is actually present in the Sacrament of the Altar because, well, it really doesn't taste like flesh and blood, our sinful nature is using the God-given gift of reason as a way of despising Christ's forgiveness.

But just as the unbeliever isn't converted by outsmarting his unbelief, so the believer isn't strengthened in the faith by outsmarting his doubt. And it's important to remember that we'll never, ever, ever triumph over our sinful doubts when we counter them through the same use of reason. In the Lord's Supper, for example, we will never defeat our doubts by offering some kind of metaphysical, scientific, rationalistic explanation for the possibility of the real presence. We will, however, always defeat those and any other doubts in one very simple way: when we hear the voice of the Shepherd-the same Shepherd who speaks "This is my body, this is my blood." The same Shepherd who promises in today's text, "I give [my sheep] eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand."

The Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter one, "for the word of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." He goes on to say, "for Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." The Gospel isn't math and Christ crucified can't be comprehended in any earthly way. And when the Gospel is proclaimed from the baptismal font, from the altar and from the pulpit, the only reason it makes sense to us is because the Shepherd himself has opened our ears to understand His voice.

In Luther's Baptismal Rite of 1523, the pastor mirrors the actions of Christ in the seventh chapter of Mark when our Lord opened the ears of the deaf man. Touching the ears of the child being baptized, the pastors says, "Ephphatha, that is, be thou opened." The reason Luther's Baptismal Rite included this is because it's in the moment of our baptism that our ears are opened to hear the voice of our Shepherd. When you were brought to the waters of your baptism, that's when you became a part of Christ's flock, when the Lamb of God made you one of His sheep. Since this is a Lutheran congregation, it's safe to assume that most of you were baptized as infants. And even though, as a little baby, you couldn't formulate words and you couldn't analyze or add together pieces of information, it didn't matter because no one, adult or child, can open his own ears through those intellectual abilities. And because our ability to hear Christ depends on His promise and not our minds, then we don't need to fear that we'll lose our faith if our minds ever fail us.

For many of us, as we grow and age, not only will our bodies deteriorate, but our minds will as well. To put a personal spin on this reality, my father's father was struck with both polio and Parkinson's disease in adulthood. And even though I was twelve years old when he died, the effects of those diseases had been so great that I don't remember ever hearing him say my name or even lift up his head to look me in the eye. But on the day of his death, this man who hadn't spoken a clear sentence or been able to control much of his body for years lifted up his head and prayed the entire Our Father. And he was able to do that because the Gospel isn't math. He was able to do that because his faith was rooted not in his mind but in the Holy Spirit given to him in his baptism. In at least the last few months of his life, William Fiene probably didn't even remember how to spell the word "Christian." But William Fiene died as a Christian. The ears of faith still hear the Shepherd's voice even if they can't hear or process the voice of anyone else. Because Christ opened William Fiene's ears to hear the voice of his Shepherd, Christ continued speaking and the Shepherd was able to guide His sheep into the life to come.

Having that indestructible faithfulness of the Shepherd-that's what it means to be a Christian. And for every Christian here today-for the old and the young, the weak and the strong, the calculus aces and the algebra flunkers-the crucified and risen Shepherd calls to every one of you and He will always call to you. And because your ears have been opened, every one of you is forgiven, defended and guided by the voice of Christ our Shepherd.