Sunday, May 26, 2024, Holy Trinity Sunday
“Brothers, What Shall We Do?”
Ps. 29:1-11; Isaiah 6:1-8; Acts 2:14a, 22-36; John 3:1-17
Hymns: #507 “Holy, Holy, Holy”; “America the Beautiful”; #940 “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name”; #805 “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”; #966 “Before You, Lord, We Bow”
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
“God shed His grace on thee,” the old patriotic hymn says about this country we get to live in. How blessed are we today? How many graces has God poured out on us? How good has He been to us? He’s given us spacious skies, and fields full of grain, and mountains and plains full of fruit for our food. Martin Luther says in our Catechism that He gives us “clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all we have. He richly and daily provides us with all that we need to support this body and life.” We’ve been crowned with God’s goodness, from sea to shining sea.
We thank our Father in Heaven today for all the pilgrim feet - for our parents, grandparents, and ancestors who put their sweat, work, and labor into making this country what it is, and for helping keep us a free people for all these years. I walk through Oxford Village Cemetery almost every day, past the graves of people who worked faithfully all their lives, so you and I could have a chance to live here, too. Thank You, Lord, for the grace to have known them, and to have their example to follow, and for the grace to carry on the work they started in this place. And Lord, we know we aren’t a perfect country, and that we have many flaws that need mending; but we pray that by Your grace You’ll continue to mend us and make us a better people.
And how blessed we are, Lord, on this Memorial Day weekend, as we remember our “heroes proved in liberating strife,” all those men, and women too, who were willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of right, and life, and mercy. When I walk through the cemetery this week, some kind soul will have put those little flags on all the places they belong. How blessed we are to have people like that in our country, willing to give everything they have to keep us free. Please try to get to one of our local Memorial Day ceremonies tomorrow. To remember them is the least, and also the very best thing, that we can do.
By the grace of God, we’re blessed to still have dreams that “see beyond the years.” All of us, when we look around at how things are, have that temptation to throw up our hands and give up, thinking our best days are behind us. But you and I know - by the grace of God and the faith we have in Him, we know - that our “alabaster cities” can shine again, “undimmed by human tears,” and that the things that are broken and sad in this place can still be mended, by the love of Christ and by those of us who have the courage and faith to work to make it happen.
To that end, what should our response to God’s grace be? God has shed His grace on us; now what can we give back to Him in return? Martin Luther’s answer from our Catechism is, “Therefore it is my duty to thank and praise, serve and obey Him; this is most certainly true.”
Good Isaiah, in our Old Testament reading, was a priest before God called him to be a prophet. He was on duty in the temple, doing the things he ordinarily did, and not expecting anything different; and then God showed up. God the Almighty, God the Creator, God the Triune, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three distinct Persons in one divine Being - God in all His glory, with all His holy angels - came and filled the place where Isaiah was standing, and the angel voices shook the doorposts and thresholds, and the place was filled with holy smoke. Isaiah was terrified; not so much because of the shaking and the smoke, but because Isaiah knew what a sinful man he was, and how holy his God was, and how unworthy he was to see the face God and stand in the light of His glory. Isaiah and all the Hebrew people believed and had been taught that if man looked upon the face of God, he’d die. “Woe is me!” Isaiah said.
Isaiah expected to die, but God chose to shed His grace upon the man instead. That coal from the altar that was touched to Isaiah’s lips? That wasn’t punishment, pain, or condemnation; it was the touch of God’s grace and mercy. It was a sign of atonement and forgiveness and sins taken away. It might have burned a little, but it was a beautiful thing.
And then, the Lord didn’t ask Isaiah for anything; not directly, anyway. God didn’t order him to do anything, or force him to obey, or give him a commandment to follow. God just sort of looked around and said, “Now who will go for us? Who, I wonder? Hmmmmmm…” And Isaiah, so happy to be blessed, forgiven, and saved – and not dead - responded to God’s grace and mercy and blessings the same way you and I ought to. He said, “Ooooh! Ooooh! Here I am, Lord, here I am! Send me, Lord! Send me!” Lord, You’ve shed Your grace on me; now tell me what I can do for You.
Reading through the rest of the Book of Isaiah, the mission God had in mind for His brand-new prophet certainly wasn’t an easy one; “prophet” has always been a tough assignment. Isaiah was called to speak God’s truth to people who didn’t always want to hear it, and to bring God’s words and judgement to the ears of powerful, arrogant kings who’d just as soon murder a prophet as listen to him. God’s truth has a way sometimes of making people angry; the truth sometimes stings, burns, and hurts. Legend says prophet Isaiah was martyred by being sawn in two. But all a prophet can do it tell the people, “This is what the Lord says.” And that’s what faithful Isaiah did. God shed His grace on him, and he gave his heart to God.
Our Lord Jesus chose to shed His grace on a man named Simon Peter, and on eleven other men He chose to be His first disciples. Simon Peter was a simple fisherman by trade. Not a scholar, not a priest, not anybody in the eyes of anybody; yet Jesus saw to fit to choose him, train him, and equip him, to take the Good News about grace and salvation into the world.
In our reading from Acts, Peter the fisherman, filled with grace and the Holy Spirit, gets up to deliver his Pentecost sermon, in a miraculous language that everyone there could understand. God had poured out grace on Him, and now he found the courage to pour out the news of God’s grace to the crowd, and tell them the story of Jesus that we’ve all come to know well: “Born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, died, and was buried, raised again on the third day, coming again with glory to raise both the living and the dead.”
And then he lays the hard truth on them: “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ." He confronts them with the same truth that once confronted prophet Isaiah: God is holy, absolutely holy, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, and we’re the ones who caused the God of love to put His only Son on the cross for the sake of our sin. “You killed the Son of God,” Peter tells them.
I had some conversations years ago with a man who blamed the Jews for everything, blamed them for all the troubles in the world. (We’ve all seen that anti-Semitism and hatred for the Jews in the news a lot lately, it’s nothing new). The gist of his argument was, “But the Jews killed Jesus.” My answer to him was, “Yes, the Jews killed Jesus. And Pilate killed Jesus, and Herod killed Jesus, and you and I killed Jesus. We all killed Jesus with our sin; and we all deserve to burn in hell for it, every last one of us.” The Christian faith leaves no room or place for hate, for the Jewish people or for anyone else. God has touched our lips with His wonderful, fiery coal of grace, and our sins have been atoned for, paid for in full, and fully forgiven, if only we’ll turn our hearts to believe what Jesus says. And what Jesus says is, “Love one another, love your enemies, and love your neighbor as yourself.” He couldn’t be more clear.
Simon Peter denied three times that he even knew who Jesus was, and he hid himself away while Jesus died. He spent a terrible weekend with his guilt and sorrow and hopeless tears - until Jesus spread out His hands, with the nail scars still in them, and told him, “Peace be with you.” The Jesus breathed new life into Peter and the other disciples, and said, “As the Father has sent Me, now I am sending you.” And He sent them the Holy Spirit, as promised, with the Pentecostal wind and fire we heard about last week. And now here was Peter, the career fisherman, standing up and saying all those amazing words that cut the people right to the quick: “When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, "Brothers, what shall we do?" That’s the big question for us still; what shall we do? God has poured out His grace on us, and now He’s pointing us to a world and a neighborhood full of broken hearts and troubles and desperate needs, and saying, “Who will go for us? Who, I wonder? Hmmmmmm…”
Peter’s answer to the “what shall we do?” question is still the only answer there is, or ever can be, if we hope to be saved ourselves, and help others to be saved: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” And then, says Jesus, “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
God has poured out His grace on us, in so many ways. Despite what some may say, this is still a Christian nation, founded and still guided by principles that come straight from God’s Word. Our laws, our system of jurisprudence, our legal standards, our Constitution - all of it is grounded and has its roots in Jesus’ teaching and God’s Word. (Read through Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, and you’ll see that it’s true). We haven’t lost it just yet. We still have the inalienable rights our Triune God endowed us with. We’re still free to gather in this place and worship this morning. We’re still free to talk about Jesus in public places, even if certain people want to pile on and cancel us for it. We’re still free to take the saving Gospel wherever it needs to be heard (which is everywhere!) That might not always be so, the way things are going. But today we’re still free to take our beautiful, impassioned, pilgrim feet into that wilderness of a world, and tell our friends and neighbors what we know and what we believe. “Work while the sun is shining,” Jesus says, “because a day is coming when no one can work.”
This world is still full of Nicodemus’s, people looking for mercy and hungry for grace, in a world where such things can be so hard to find. They hope that there’s hope, they’re looking for something, just not quite knowing what that something is, or what that missing thing in their lives, might be. They may be thinking, or even asking, “Where is the hope? How is it possible? What’s all this stuff about Jesus, and being “born again?” How can this be? And here’s our chance to shed God’s grace on someone else, as God has shed His marvelous grace on us. You all know the story; you’ve been hearing it all your life: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son,” simple as that. John 3:16 is such a famous verse, one we know well and one most people know, and it’s a great place to start the “Jesus conversation.” But John 3:17 is pretty awesome, too: “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.”
That’s the Good News we have to tell the world; God has shed His grace on us. Not because we earned it or deserve it - God knows we don’t; but because God loved us enough to send us His Son, and because He loves us still. God didn’t condemn Isaiah with his filthy lips, but loved and forgave him instead, and blessed him with good work to do for the sake of His kingdom. Jesus didn’t rake poor Peter or his friends over the coals for their sin, but blessed them with peace and forgiveness instead, and gave them the difficult and dangerous but joyful work of taking the Good News out into the world. And God, in spite of our own flaws that still need mending, has given us His Spirit, to help us “open our lips to declare His praise” in this country of ours. Lord, help us to do it. May we have the grace to love God and our brothers and sisters and neighbors more than ourselves. May we the grace to love mercy more than our own lives.
Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg address, in the middle of a civil war that was tearing our country to pieces, called for “a new birth of freedom” in this place. That can happen again – a real and genuine revival of Christian love and freedom - but if it’s going to happen, it’s going to have to come from little churches like this one, and from people like us, as we turn our hearts to pray for God’s grace, and our hands and feet to do the works of mercy God is asking us to do. May God continue to shed His grace on us, until everyone has heard the Good News. In Jesus’ name; Amen.