Sunday, March 16, 2025, Second Sunday in Lent

“Resolute”

Divine Service IV with Holy Communion

Hymns: #560 “Drawn to the Cross”; #718 ”Jesus, Lead Thou On”; #405 “To Jordan’s River Came Our Lord”

Dear Friends in Christ,

Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.

I’m stuck on a word again today. You know how I love to take a word and pick it apart, go to the dictionary and etymology webs sites and figure out where a word came from and what it really means. The word I’ve been going after this week is the word “resolute.”

The Lord Jesus we meet in our Gospel today had a goal, and He was resolute. He wanted nothing more, and He would accept nothing less, than bringing us forgiveness for our sins and blessing us with eternal life. Neither suffering nor abuse nor that awful, bloody cross would keep Him from that goal. My prayer for us all is that we keep our eyes on the goal Jesus has for us, and be as resolute as He.

So, I discovered in my research, the word “resolute” comes originally from the Latin word resolutus, which means “to untie, unfasten, or loosen something.” The word originally meant “dissolved or loose in structure”, or even “morally lax” – which is the total opposite of what it means now; but words and their meanings sometimes evolve over time.

By the mid-1500’s or so, “resolute” had come to mean “determined, decided, absolute, or final.” The gist of the word means to break something down into its parts as way to arrive at the truth of it - to take a concept, a philosophy, a theory, or an idea, and distill it down to its bare essence to determine what is or isn’t true. In other words, “resolute” means to discard all the baloney and lies and half-truths of a thing, until all you’re left with is the real thing. And that thing is the thing you take your stand on.

We meet a very resolute Jesus in our Gospel reading today; and God knows, He had to be. The Herod and Pilates of His day, the government leaders and secular leadership, mistrusted Him and saw Him as a potential threat to civil order. The Pharisees, scribes, and Sadducees, the religious leaders of His day, hated Him enough to want Him dead,

because He had a habit of telling them the uncomfortable and unwelcome truth. To all of them, His truth-telling honesty was a threat to the system of graft and compromise and political corruption that was keeping them all rich and in places of power.

Crooked politics, even crooked church politics, aren’t anything new in this world. Jesus walked through a world where everyone was playing political games and trying to game the system for their own advantage. It was the politics of His day formed the context in which He preached and went about His mission; there was no getting away from it. And it’s really no different for us today, in the world we have to live in.

Jesus was resolute to do the right thing always: and the right and righteous thing was to carry out the will of His Father in Heaven, and be obedient to Him. That meant challenging every evil and unholy thing He encountered, and putting all the con men and liars to silence with the unvarnished truth, and driving the devil and all his minions out of the places they didn’t belong. (Like driving the moneychangers out of the temple). He was resolute to bring healing everywhere that He found suffering or hurt or pain. And He was resolute most of all to reach His final goal, that cross on a hill outside Jerusalem, where He would “destroy the last enemy, death.”

In Isaiah chapter 50, in one of the great Old Testament prophecies about Jesus, we can hear the voice of our Savior. There He says: “I did not hide My face from mocking and spitting, but the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame.” Flint is among the hardest of stones, used from ancient times to make spear tips and arrow heads. To be “like flint” means to be resolute, to be resolved, to be stone-faced and sure-footed and unshakeable in your faith in God.

There’s another passage in Luke chapter 9 that says, “As the time approached for Jesus to be taken up to heaven, He resolutely set out for Jerusalem.” Jesus “set His face like flint” to go to Jerusalem, “the place where all the prophets go to die.” The disciples were appalled when He told them where they were going. They said, “Yesterday they were trying to kill you in that place, and now You want to go back there?” Common sense said to run fast as You can in the other direction (like Jonah) - but that He would not do.

There’s a wonderful, descriptive Greek word for “resolutely”, there in Luke 9, that I just have to share with you. The word is sterizo. Sterizo means to making something stable or solid or firm. Jesus sterizo set out for Jerusalem. It’s a word that means

becoming strengthened or established in your faith, purpose, and resolve. It means that something has been firmly established in your heart and in your mind, and by God, it’s going to stay that way. It was a word that was sometimes used in Jesus’ day for architecture and constructing buildings. Every building needs a firm foundation to stand on – one built on rock and not on sand.

Likewise, our souls and spirits need a firm foundation. The Christians in the early Church faced harassment and trouble and terrible persecution, and even death, for the sake of living out their faith in Christ. They needed to be sterizo, strong and established in their faith, to go through what they had to go through. We need that, too, and we’ll need it more and more as the time grows closer for Jesus to come, and the opposition to Him grows. “Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power,” St. Paul says.

To that end, to help keep us established and strong and resolute in our faith, Paul writes to us in Philippians 3 about holding on “to the pattern we have been given.” What that pattern is, folks, isn’t anything that’s all that deep or difficult or complicated or hard to do. It’s nothing you need a degree in theology for. That’s a good thing to pursue if the Lord calls you to it, and you can go as deep into theological things as your intellect will allow; but it still comes down in the end to being resolute about the very basic things. If you want to be a master of this or a master of that, or get yourself a PhD, and have a whole string of impressive acronyms and alphabets attached to your name, go for it, and go with God. But faith at its strongest and best is still faith that’s been distilled down to a common Creed, an “I believe” Creed so simple you can teach it to child.

To be resolute is to stay, resolutely, in God’s divine and ancient pattern of worship, the pattern of prayer and Word and Sacrament that was first given to Israel – and as we are still here doing on this day. It’s resolutely being here in the Presence of God and receiving the Sacrament, week after week and year after year. It’s being faithful in daily prayer and Scripture reading and devotions, and teaching your children to do the same. It’s being stubborn as can be about doing those things and resolving to never neglect them or put them aside. The “divine pattern” is the one thing that will defend us from the “enemies of the cross of Christ” that St. Paul writes about, and the one thing that will keep us full of the Holy Spirit and always faithful. It is, in fact, both the preventative, the cure, and the remedy for backsliding! “If you do these things, you will never fall,” St. Peter says.

St. Paul calls us in our epistle reading to be resolute, to “stand firm in Lord.” And the wonderful Greek word there for “stand firm” is steko. Be steko in the Lord. In Paul’s day, the word steko was often associated with armies and soldiers and warfare, where soldiers were expected to be steko and to hold their ground in battle. Roman soldiers had a full complement of armor in the front, head to toe, but no armor or protection in the back at all, because they weren’t allowed to retreat.

Likewise we Christians are called to be resolute and steadfast through every challenge to our faith that may come our way. Resolute like weeping prophet Jeremiah, faithful to God and telling the truth God gave him to tell, even when they threw him down a well. Resolute like the first apostles, and St. Paul, who were faithful to their calling even if it meant they had to die. Resolute as our Savior Jesus as He made His way to the cross for our sakes. Resolute in our faith, even if persecution or trouble should come our way, and distill it all down to a simple Creed that we might have to whisper in the dark.

If “resolute” truly means distilling our faith down to something we can take a stand on; if circumstances call us, like Jesus, to “pick the hill we’re willing to die on,” that means so much other peripheral stuff we “church folk” love to engage in – church politics, power games, theological quibbles – and especially that awful, prideful need we so often have to “always be right” - all of that stuff ought to be, and really needs to be put to the side - until the hope we have in the cross and resurrection of Jesus is all we have left to stand on, and all we have left to say to the world around us.

My prayer, my brothers and sisters in Christ, is that with God helping us, we’ll all be very resolute in this task that God has given us – and that is to hold on to our faith in a hostile world, and to help everyone around us to do the same. To that end, welcome to Lord’s Table, to the blessed Sacrament, which is the heart and soul and center of this divine and holy pattern we’ve been called to live in. May we find here on God’s altar the power and strength and courage we need to be “resolute” until the Lord comes. In Jesus’ name; Amen.