Sunday, February 16, 2025, Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
“The Road to Blessings”
Jeremiah 17:5-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 6:17-26
Divine Service IV with Holy Communion
Hymns: #685 “Let Us Ever Walk with Jesus”; #523 “O Word of God Incarnate”; #908 “Lord, Open Now My Heart to Hear”; #711 “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
In a Church where I was once a pastor, I was new at the place and just arrived there. I began our first Elder’s meeting with a short devotion and Bible study, just ten or fifteen minutes or so. After our second meeting, one of my elders – Jack, his name was- complained about it. He said, “Why are we wasting time at these meetings on Bible studies? I learned all that stuff back in Sunday school; I don’t need to hear it again.” It kind of surprised me to hear that from an elder of a Missouri Synod church. It took me a minute to answer, once I recovered myself and put my jaw back in place.
My answer was, “No, Jack, no… What you learned back in Sunday school was only the beginning, the foundation of your faith. If you want to build a house, the foundation is only the start; nobody lives in the foundation. You have to build that house you call your soul with God’s help - brick by brick, stick by stick, all your life. And all your life you’ll have to do maintenance on that house - or the roof will leak, and the walls will buckle, and everything will fall to pieces. Keeping our hearts in God’s Word isn’t a waste of our time; it’s the thing that will keep us all on the road to heaven.” We kept on with those little Bible studies, and my friend Jack continued to complain about them, until his term as Elder was up and we found him another job in the Church. (We elected him chairman!) But you can only do what you can do.
If (when!) the time comes that you need God’s healing power, or a day comes when you’re poor or hungry or mourning, as Jesus says in our Gospel, or the world or the devil come to challenge your faith (and they will), you’re going to need to take your heart back to what you learned as a child. If you’re rich and well fed and everything in your life is going just fine, it’s easy enough, I guess, to put aside all that simple “Sunday School stuff” - but don’t you do it! My Catechism children always complain, “Why do we have to memorize all this stuff?” And I answer, “Because one day it’s going to be dark- and you can’t read in the dark.”
Prophet Jeremiah put it well for us today: “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit."
Jesus has showed us the road to His blessings, and He wants to keep us walking upon it, because He knows that staying on that road that will bring us peace, comfort, and joy - even in those times when our lives are less than joyful. We won’t get where we’re going by taking side roads or getting off track. There’s only one way to get to Heaven – the “narrow road,” Jesus called it. And the preventative for backsliding and wandering away from your faith is simple enough: It’s to stay in God’s Word every day of your life, and to be here in worship every Sunday you’re able, and to receive the blessed Sacrament every time it’s offered. “If you do these things, you will never fall,” St. Peter says.
So, says Paul to these Christians in the Corinthian Church, “Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before!” “Now brothers, he says” - my fellow Christians, my fellow believers (the word for ‘brothers’ literally means ‘from the same womb’) – “I want to remind you, once again, about the Gospel I preached to you from the beginning.”
The Gospel, to define it, is the Good News about Jesus Christ - about who He was, and what He did, and what He’s doing now. It’s the same Gospel you received “way back when,” and it hasn’t changed a bit. It’s the same Gospel you’ve been taught all your life to stand on, the Good News that’s kept you going whenever your world turned dark. (It’s easier to see that looking back on things, hindsight being twenty-twenty). And it’s the Gospel you’ll have to stand on through whatever may come from this point on, if you’re going to stand at all.
“By this Gospel you are saved,” says Paul; and he’s being very specific here. We’re not talking about some other Gospel, some fancy new thing, like what seems to come down the pike with every new generation that comes along; but this same old Gospel, this particular one, the One Jesus Christ brought us and taught us when He came here to earth all those years ago. This is “the Gospel of Truth”, the only one that’s able to bring you forgiveness for your sin and save your soul. Any other version is a fraud, that “house built on sand” that Jesus warned us about.
This blessed Gospel of Jesus will certainly save you, Paul says, “If… if, if, if… you hold firmly to the Word I preached to you” - Sunday after Sunday, week after week, year after year. “Otherwise,” says Paul, “you have believed in vain.” Do you get what he’s saying there? The faith you had yesterday won’t save you. What you once believed years ago won’t do you any good if you don’t still believe it today. What matters is that you hold on to your faith today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, and especially that you’re found holding fast to Christ on the day you die - and none of us knows when that will be.
“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance,” Paul says. What we have here in 1st Corinthians, only twenty years or so after the Ascension of Christ (54 or 55 A.D. or so) is one of the very first versions of the Apostle’s Creed. This is the account of the ministry of Jesus that Paul heard directly from the first apostles; and it’s the Word the apostles heard from Jesus Himself as they walked along with Him - the account of what they saw Him do, and everything that was done to Him, all for our sakes. These are “the things that are of first importance.” These are the things you simply must know and believe to keep yourself on the road to heaven’s blessings, and off the pathway to hell.
“Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,” says Paul. There is no Christianity, and no salvation, apart from the old rugged cross. There is no hope, for us or for anyone, without the events that happened on that bloody day back in 33 A.D. The Scriptures Paul refers to here are the Old Testament prophets, who told us hundreds of years before our Savior came about what the Christ would be like and what He would do – “pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities” and all the rest. The New Testament Scriptures were a work in progress and had yet to be completed at the time Paul wrote; the Christian Church was still brand new. But “the new is in the old concealed, and the old is in the new revealed”; and all the Scriptures point to the road our Savior would walk to the cross, and to the road He would have us walk with Him.
And without a Resurrection, of course, everything we’re doing here today would be pointless. Paul writes in another place, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is useless and so it your faith.” But… but, but, but… “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Paul reminds the Corinthian Christians that “Jesus was buried” – dead and cold, wrapped in funeral linens and laid to rest in a tomb – “and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, He appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.”
Here, folks, is the difference between the true and ancient and wonderful Gospel that you and I have come to believe, and all the other so-called pathways to heaven that you might hear preached about in the world. The Jesus Christ we believe in wasn’t just a teacher or a prophet or a guru, who once lived and taught good and holy things, and then died. If that’s what you want, you can go to Mecca to visit the grave of Mohammed, or stand in line to venerate the Buddha’s little finger. The Christian Gospel, the good Good News, tells us that our Savior lives, that He stood up and breathed again after He’d been crucified. And there were eyewitnesses – many of them – to bear witness to the fact: The women at the tomb on Easter morning, Peter and John and the rest of the disciples on the evening of that day; and later on, even old Doubting Thomas got to touch the places where the nails had been, and call out, “My Lord and My God!”
And there’s that astonishing detail in the Gospel account that in the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus, He showed Himself to many people, at many different times, once “to five hundred brothers at the same time,” Paul says. And when Paul wrote this letter to the Corinthians, many of those eyewitnesses were still alive. “So go and ask them if you don’t believe me,” Paul is saying. The Resurrection is the difference maker. It’s the difference between a religion or pathway or philosophy that will leave you nowhere but dead, and a road to blessings that will lead you to joy and peace and life forever. That’s the abundant life, the “life to the full,” that Jesus has promised to everyone who believes.
“And last of all,” says Paul, “He appeared to me also, as to one who was abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” This, folks, just might be the best part of this Good News we have to share; it’s the Good News about who this Gospel is for! When Paul calls himself abnormally born, he’s calling himself a miscarriage, an abortion; in other words, a worthless failure, a crushing disappointment to his Father in heaven.
St. Paul, while he was still living as Saul the Pharisee, had made it his personal mission in life to destroy the new Christian Church, and to round up Christian men and women everywhere and throw them in jail, and even have them put to death. Saul, certain he was doing right, was on his way to Damacus to find and arrest the Christians there, when Jesus Christ Himself stopped him in his tracks along the way. And the Lord knocked him off his high horse and changed the road he was on - a road, if he had stayed upon it, that would have taken him only to hell.
Saul the Pharisee wasn’t looking for Jesus, but Jesus in His mercy came looking for him - the same as He comes looking for you and me. This Gospel of ours, more than anything else, is about the grace of God. Grace, to define it, is “a gift than none of us deserve.” God, if He had wished to do so, could have left us on the road we were on, and been justified in doing it. But because He loves us, and because He is a God of mercy, He chose to pour out His love upon us in the Person of Jesus His only Son – “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, died, and buried, and on the third day raised up again from the dead.” Not because of anything we earned or deserved – far from it – but because God in His mercy loves us in spite of ourselves. That’s the true Christian Gospel. Abnormally born and deformed by sin as we once were, God has chosen by grace to pick us up and dust us off and put us back on the road to blessings.
So what does it mean to know the Gospel? What does it mean, how does it change your life, to know the Good News and believe it and take it to heart? Good St. Paul confesses here, “By the grace of God – only by the grace of God – I am what I am, and His grace to me was not without effect.” What we Christians confess - and this is also such a wonderful part of this Good News we have to share - is that it’s true enough that we’re nothing in ourselves. We were all sinners, walking that road that leads to death and hell forever. But we are who we are – that is, forgiven and saved and joyful and free on this day - because of God’s wonderful grace. “Not because of what I’ve done, but because of who You are,” a Christian praise song says.
Paul does just a little bit of boasting here about how hard he’s worked for the Lord, and about all the work he’s done for Jesus’ sake. (And he has a right to; the man walked the hard road for Jesus, and went through more hardships than any of us can even imagine, while planting churches and spreading the Gospel all over the known world; Paul did more to spread the Gospel of Christ than any man who ever lived). Yet he gives all the glory for it to God. “It wasn’t me working,” he says, “but the grace of God working through me.” That’s the road to blessings, folks.
Paul says finally, “Whether then it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.” Wherever you first heard the Good News, and whoever you first heard it from (don’t forget to thank them!) that good Sunday school Gospel is your rock and your help and your hope. Because of what it is (and not because of who you are), the Gospel is and always will be powerful and effective and there for you to stand on, no matter what you have to walk through to get to where you’re going. You can count on it.
And now, Father in Heaven, we ask You to bless us, defend us, and keep us faithful, as we follow Your dear Son Jesus on the road to heaven’s blessings. We thank You that Your powerful Word puts forgiveness and grace and the blessing of life in the Holy Communion we’re about to receive. Keep us forever strong and faithful, and also thankful and grateful and obedient and willing to serve you, until all of us praise You in heaven together at last. In Jesus’ name; Amen.