John 3:1-17

Script

Props: You will need three images for this children’s sermon, printed out on paper. The first is an image of Jesus, the second, an image of a dove, and the third, a burning bush. Put the image of Jesus on a cross in your church, the dove on the baptismal font, and the burning bush on the alter, stained glass Ten Commandments, or a Bible.

Pastor: Good morning boys and girls! Welcome! Let’s say good morning to our friend Sammy and see if she is there. Ready? One, two, three: Good morning, Sammy!

Sammy: Good morning, everyone! I have something really special for all of you to do this morning.

Pastor: What’s that, Sammy?

Sammy: Pastor, I would like you and all of the boys and girls to solve a mystery for me.

Pastor: A mystery?

Sammy: Yes! It’s about our faith. I hid pictures in the church.

Pastor: What do you think, boys and girls? Do you think we can help Sammy solve a mystery about faith?

Pastor: Can you give us some direction or a hint before we get started, Sammy?

Sammy: Yes! I will give you one hint at a time. Are you ready?

Pastor: We are ready.

Sammy: The first item you need to find is located on the place where Jesus died.

Pastor: What do you think boys and girls? [located on a cross in the church]

Sammy: Great work! The next item to see is a place where we can baptize a baby. [Located on a baptismal font] 

Pastor: We can baptize babies, children, and adults!

Sammy: Hooray for baptism! Did you find the clue?

Pastor: We found it!

Sammy: Your final clue is this: It’s the Law of Moses, written by the hand of the one who knows us. There’s ten of these commands—just like the ten fingers on your hands! [located on a Bible or on a stained glass window of the Ten Commandments]

Pastor: Great job with searching for these clues everyone! Let’s put them together and see what we see.

Sammy: What do you see everyone?

[Allow time for responses]

Pastor: We see Jesus, a dove, and a burning bush.

Sammy: Here’s the mystery we need to solve: What do these three things have in common?

[Allow time for responses]

Pastor: I think these three images represent the Holy Trinity, Sammy.

Sammy: Exactly!

Pastor: There is a mystery within your mystery, Sammy.

Sammy: There is?

Pastor: The Holy Trinity is here in front of us, and the Trinity itself is a mystery of faith to us. We understand that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each a person of the Trinity, three in one, but no one completely understands the Trinity. It’s hard to explain and that’s why it’s a mystery of faith.

Sammy: That’s really cool, Pastor.

Pastor: Yes, it is, Sammy. Boys and girls, will you fold your hands and bow your heads in prayer with me please? Dear Jesus, We thank you for coming to earth to die for our sins. We thank you Father for your great love for us. We thank you Holy Spirit for always being with us. Amen.

Sammy: Bye, everyone!

Pastor: Bye, Sammy!

While visiting another Lutheran church in the area as the gathered worshipped the LORD through the prayers and praised God through the songs, across the pews I saw a man, arms folded, a closed lip face saying, “I dare you.”

How can you be resentful in worship when we should be joining the angels in singing and celebrating the glorious grace of God?

If you say to yourself that you won’t sing louder; if you argue within your spirit against the invitation to give yourself to worship – Right there! Right in that thought of your rebellion dwells your sinful resistance.  If you hear the Word in a sermon and you are whispering in your mind, “Pastor, you can pound sand!”; just perhaps you have a resentful, rebellious faith.

Is your resistance because the call to worship is unbiblical or contrary to faith? No. Is being resentful and stubborn to the invitation of God unbiblical?  No. Unfortunately we see a lot of stubborn resistance in the Bible.

After people fled from the Babylonian siege in Judah into Egypt, the wives gave themselves over to worshipping a goddess. Even though idolatry and false values were the reason for all their previous troubles, still they traded the LORD for gods and priorities that have no power to give life. When the prophet Jeremiah warns them, they resent the prophet for meddling (Jer 44:1-30).  Is that your attitude?  “Don’t tell us how to be faithful to God.”  Do you have a resentful faith where you want Jesus, but don’t want him “telling me what to do!” 

In worship, we gather not for our amusement. We gather to celebrate the glory of God. When your pride and your resistance to worship gets your hackles up, you are not worshiping or faith-filled to God. When you are offended for being called to worship regularly, your stubborn nature is resisting God’s grace.        

As redeemed sinners we need to recognize that the very act of worship is spiritual warfare. That the Holy Spirit, the kingdom of God and the Gospel of our Crucified Savior are doing battle with the false gods and values embedded and bonded to our human nature. Worship is about the very act of being called, exorcised, out of darkness and brought into God’s marvelous light by the Spirit.

How can we resent the Lord who loves us stubborn folks so much, that not only does he give us the blessing of each breath and each day, but gives his own beloved Son to die on the cross for our stiff-necked sin to release us into the joy of faith?  Rather than stubborn resistance, we have been reconciled to God through Christ so we may bask in God’s grace, love and forgiveness. Rather than arm folded resentment we are called to angel flying joy of praising the One who loves us.

Since Jesus endured the cross and its shame so that we may gather in the joyful assembly, we have something to be joyful and excited about. In the presence of God we glory in the hope and joy we have received through Christ. As God’s people we are celebrating the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit. 

Christ wants you to have the full measure of his joy. Faith replaces resentment. Be filled with faith.

May the proven genuineness of your faith result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed (1 Peter 1:7)

Pastor Douglas 

Editor’s Note: This piece was written by a Luther Seminary student earlier this spring.

I can’t tell you what spring is like in places beyond the Midwest — I’m sure they have it but it certainly pales in comparison to the spring that we enjoy in Minnesota. Saint Anthony Park and the ever-creaky Bockman Hall were covered in snow one day this week and basked in warm sun the next. Through open windows a new breeze blows in and with it the promise of a new age. A new age not held by the chains of ice and cold but one dominated by the warmth of the sun.

It is on to this odd state of transition that I cannot help but project my own faith. We as believers live in a time of transition. We have felt the warmth of the Son but are all too familiar with the cold and death of sin. Yet just like those experiencing spring in Minnesota, we know that the days of sin are numbered. We may not know for certain what that number is but that God has assigned it.

There is a moment in early March (and yes, I am a hardy one) when we first feel the warmth that God has given us. It is a feeling unlike anything else as it brings us to the end of our reality and then on to the next. That first warm day in March announces that winter is ending and summer is soon to follow. It is a sweet promise but one that loses its meaning if we spend the rest of the season behind closed windows and in a dorm. There, away from the sun, the promise becomes stale.

I remember the moment when I first felt the warmth of Christ. It brought me to the end of my reality and onto the next. Yet it is a warmth unappreciated when it is followed by distance and silence; by greeting the new breeze with closed windows and walls. Like students in spring, we as believers must live into the warmth and not merely observe its effect through a double-paned window. We will never replace the experience of when the Son first broke the cold but we can continue to live into the promise of that which the Son brings.

How do we live in the sun in a time when winter looms so close? I really couldn’t say but certainly we must first step from our dorms and houses and into where that light shines. We know darkness because we have seen light; cold because we have felt warmth. There is wisdom in that simple pairing — now that we have known, we should know.

The snow on my window’s ledge is gone but, without any regard of my own attitudes, it may return tomorrow. Spring is a time of transition, one that aims to break us of winter and usher in a period where we need not worry about snow. Until that time, I will have to wait and celebrate the warmth as it is given — that is the reassurance that allows us to hope for summer even when winter surprises us again.

A. Nestenprest

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word
by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to
wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell
John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight,
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and
the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is
anyone who takes no offense at me.” (Matthew 11:2-6 NRSV)

There goes the Son …

Evangelical Lutheran Worship

These days, there are many who are offended by the God revealed in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Scriptures.  The primary offense is caused by the name Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Others take offense at the masculine pronouns that the Bible uses for God.  As a result, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in its hymnal Evangelical Lutheran Worship, worked diligently to reduce the use of masculine pronouns to refer to God. This was particularly true in the translation of the Psalms. In addition, they provided an alternate invocation for the beginning of the liturgy that enabled congregations to avoid saying Father and Son.  Many of the Prayers of the Day and all of the Proper Prefaces, were changed so that prayer was addressed to God in general rather than to the Father.  Over the years, Sundays and Seasons, the electronic worship resource from Augsburg Fortress, has offered a variety of alternatives for those who are so offended. Finally, at the 2019 Churchwide Assembly, a social statement was passed calling for an even greater use of “gender-inclusive and expansive language for God.”

The Trinity

The Augsburg Confession, on the other hand, affirms the doctrine of the Trinity in the strongest terms, saying:

We
unanimously hold and teach, in accordance with the decree of the Council of
Nicaea,’ that there is one divine essence, which is called and which is truly
God, and that there are three persons in this one divine essence, equal in
power and alike eternal: God the Father,
God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.[1][emphasis mine]

What’s at Stake?

So what is
at stake?  Is this just quibbling over
words?  Are we as Lutherans bound to the
language used in the Augsburg Confession? 
Will it really make a difference if we use expansive language for God?

The answer
is, “Yes!”  What was at stake at the
Council of Nicaea was far more than a quibble over words.  The Council was not engaged in an esoteric
debate about a doctrine that few lay people would ever understand.  What was at stake was the Incarnation
itself.  Is the Son divine, or only the
Father?  Was God truly incarnate in Jesus
of Nazareth, or did it only appear to be the case?  It was the position of the orthodox that the
Gospel and salvation itself were on the line. 
Rejection of the Incarnation was a rejection of the Gospel. The Lutheran
reformers would have agreed. 

The Gospel

Why is the Gospel at stake?  To explain this, let me introduce a couple of terms with which you may not be familiar.  The terms are general revelation and particular revelation.[2]  General revelation refers to the knowledge of God that is available to all people.  Romans 1:20 says:

Ever since the creation of the world his eternal
power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and
seen through the things he has made. (NRSV)

Some knowledge of God is available to all people.  For instance, through the use of reason we can come to know that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.  If we look at nature, at the beauty and precision that it contains, we can catch a glimpse of the Creator.  If we pay attention to the moral law that is written in our hearts, we know that God is holy and righteous.  Some of us have even felt God’s presence in our lives.  Reason, nature, the moral law, and our feelings can give us some idea of what God is like.

What none of them can do, however, is enable us to know that God is a gracious God.  Knowing that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent doesn’t tell me whether God cares about me.  What nature reveals about God is too ambiguous to tell me whether he is good.  For every beautiful sunset, perfect snowflake and cuddly puppy, there is a hurricane, earthquake or an incurable disease.  The moral law tells me that God is holy, but it doesn’t tell me whether God is merciful to sinners like me.  My feelings about God are ambiguous as well.  One minute I may have a sense of God’s love and peace, but another moment I feel abandoned or condemned by God.  General revelation can take us no further.  Luther says:

I
answer that there are two ways of knowing God. One is general, the other
particular. Everyone has a general knowledge—that is, that there is a God that
created heaven and earth, that He is righteous, and that He punishes the
wicked. However, regarding what God thinks about us (His will toward us), what
He will give or do to deliver us from sin and death, and how to be saved (for
certain, this is the true knowledge of God), they don’t know any of this. In
the same way, I may know someone by sight but not thoroughly because I don’t
fully understand that person’s feelings toward me; that is how people by nature
know there is a God. But what is His will and what is not His will, they have
no idea![3]

The God We Meet in Jesus Christ

Particular
revelation, on the other hand, which refers to God incarnate, Jesus Christ,
does.  When we encounter God in the baby
in the manger and the man on the Cross, then we do know that we have a gracious
God.  It is the God we meet in Jesus Christ
who enables us to have faith, to trust that we are loved and forgiven.  Again, Luther says:

Christ
is the only means, and as you might say, the mirror in which we can see God and
by whom we can also know His will, for in Christ, we see that God is no cruel
and demanding judge but a Father of extremely goodwill, loving and merciful. In
order to bless us—that is, to deliver us from the law, sin, death, all evil,
and to grant us grace, righteousness, and eternal life—He “did not spare his
own Son, but gave him up for us all.” This is the true knowledge of God, the
divine persuasion that does not deceive us but paints us a trustworthy picture
of God, other than this there is no God.[4]

Offended by the Incarnation

This is
why traditional Lutherans are alarmed by the call for more “gender-inclusive
and expansive language for God.”  It is
not because we oppose inclusive language in general, as is often alleged, or
that we want to subordinate women to men. 
Something more is at stake.  When
we are offended by the very words that Jesus used to name God, when we are
offended by his masculinity, as in the past some were offended by his
Jewishness, when we are offended by the claim that Jesus is the way, the truth
and the life, we are offended by the Incarnation itself.  In that case, we are offended by the only
thing that makes it possible for us to know and trust that we have a gracious
God.  The Gospel, justification by faith,
and salvation itself, are at stake.  Instead
of being offended, we give thanks, as we do in the proper preface for
Christmas:

In the wonder and mystery of the Word made flesh you have opened the eyes of faith to a new and radiant vision of your glory: that beholding the God made visible, we may be drawn to love the God whom we cannot see.[5]

[1] Theodore G. Tappert. Augsburg
Confession (Kindle Locations 58-59). Kindle Edition.  

[2] Luther,
Martin. Martin Luther’s Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians
(1535): Lecture Notes Transcribed by Students and Presented in Today’s English
(p. 350). 1517 Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[3] Ibid., p. 350.

[4] Ibid., pp. 346-347.

[5]
Lutheran Book of Worship: Ministers Desk Edition.  1978 Augsburg Fortress, p. 209.

“Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” (Luke 12:13)

It’s as though the United States Congress just put its entire military at your command, and you respond by saying, “Could they mow my lawn maybe?”  There our Lord Jesus sat, preaching the kingdom of God in all its cruciform power, and this young man wants him to settle a property dispute.  Our Lord’s response was surely just: “Who made me arbitrator over you?”  He’s no arbitrator; he’s the Son of Man and Prince of Peace!

As you come to our nation’s Day of Thanksgiving, remember this great power of the One whom you thank, and His greater, joyful intention for you.  The moisture of the clouds and the grains of the earth are but a foretaste of the “kingdom come,” already pressing its way into earth through the water of Baptism and the Bread of Heaven.  He would give you more than your father’s cash; He’d give you the Father’s kingdom.

How much reason, then, to give thanks!  As you come before Him over the next several days, give thanks not only for the food on the table, but for the Food that ever lasts, His Son, Jesus Christ, and ask Him to share that Holy Feast abundantly, through you and all His Church.

LET US PRAY: O living Bread, my Lord Jesus Christ: thank You!  For what greater reason do I have to give thanks but You?  Unite my gratitude, as poor as it may be, with Your own ceaseless petitions at the Father’s right hand, and make known to all the world the glory of Your cross.  Amen

Pastor Steven K. Gjerde

Zion, Wausau

“ . . . so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” (Romans 3:26)

“Just remember, it’s not about you.”  Those were the last words I heard before I preached for the first time.  A senior at Valparaiso University, I was about to deliver the homily at one of the daily chapel services.  The chaplain assistant leading matins, who could probably see my nerves at work, leaned over and whispered, “Just remember, it’s not about you.”

There’s freedom in those words, whatever our walk of life: the freedom to let go of ourselves, even forget ourselves, and simply hand ourselves over to the task at hand.  And according to the apostle Paul, it is this same freedom that stands behind salvation in Jesus Christ.  Even there, it’s not about us: it’s about God demonstrating that He is just.  

While that promise may irritate our old selves (they always like to be at the center of attention!), it makes God’s forgiveness of you even more true and certain.  His decision to redeem, His sacrifice on the cross, and His proclamation of that redemption for you rest not on you, but entirely on Him who is eternal, the same “yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

LET US PRAY: Lord God of hosts, You have raised up preachers, teachers, and martyrs in every age to bear witness to You.  We laud and magnify Your justice; we adore Your beloved Son; and we pray for Your continued grace upon our way; in Jesus’ name.  Amen

Pastor Steven K. Gjerde

Zion, Wausau

“[Jesus said] to them, ‘Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’”  (Matthew 22:21)

What a horrifying statement.  Is our Lord Jesus Christ actually suggesting that some things don’t belong to God?  Is He giving Christians permission to participate in the sinful institutions of man?  Doesn’t He know that God wants us to be perfect, as He is perfect? (Matthew 5:48)

First, no; second and third, yes.  Of course our Lord knows that all things belong to God.  Engaging debate as a good rabbi, He simply makes a thought-provoking distinction with few words and a strong image.  But yes, He is giving His followers the freedom to participate in government, economy, and other institutions of this world, and He does so precisely because He knows that our Father wants us to be perfect as He is perfect.

For the Father’s perfection is known in this: His beloved Son assumed the flesh of this world, and dwelt and worked among sinners, for the sake of redeeming them—He even assumed the sin of the world on the cross.  Thus gifting us with His enduring friendship, God frees us—He frees you—to take on the burdens of your neighbors, too, even in something as sinful as government or (gasp!) capitalism, for the sake of love, kindness, and mercy.

LET US PRAY:  Father, Your perfection makes all things perfect!  Grant me such faith in Your Son’s mercy towards me that I take up the yoke of loving as He has first loved me; in His name I pray.  Amen

Pastor Steven K. Gjerde

Zion, Wausau

“Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” (St. Paul, writing in Philippians 2:3)

As our nation faces another shocking set of murders, it’s good to pause and remember why Christians walk a different path.  After all, it’s one thing to know your morals, and quite another to know why they’re your morals.  Why should we reject rivalry and conceit?

We can surely see the danger of both sins.  Rivalry led to the first murder on earth: Cain killing his brother Abel because Abel had the more acceptable sacrifice.  Conceit abetted the worse murder on earth: Jesus on the cross, arrested by those who thought themselves better than him.  The spirit of rivalry and pride—the hatred of our neighbor—lurks beneath every murder.  

But knowing a sin’s potential danger is not enough.  Our sinful hearts can quickly imagine an exception for ourselves, a justification for sin that makes us imagine that we can manage the risk. Better to know the true foundation of our morality: God gave His Son for sinners.   

Because God stands at the center of all reality, that sacrificial love for all people stands there, too.  God counted sinners more significant than Himself, so significant that He gave His life for theirs.  Being His children, and thus desiring to live in harmony with Him, we follow on that same path: no rivalry, no conceit, no murder, but only loving neighbors as our true selves.  

LET US PRAY: Forgive me, Lord.  I’d rather love myself than my neighbor, and so I do, on most days.  I am not You, Lord, as You know full well, and I often forget.  Yet since it is Your glory to have compassion on the sinner, have compassion on me.  By Your Holy Spirit grant that I would learn to find my true self not in myself, but in Your Son, and so also in His neighbors, and thus forgetting myself, love You and neighbor alike; through Christ Your Son.  Amen

Pastor Steven K. Gjerde

Zion, Wausau