Sunday, November 23, 2025… Last Sunday of the Church Year
“The Difference”
Scripture Readings: Psalm 46; Malachi 3:13-18; Colossians 1:13-20; Luke 23:27-43
Service of Prayer and Preaching, p. 260 LSB
Hymns: #850 “God of Grace and God of Glory”; #932 “Jesus Sat with His Disciples” (sung to the tune of #423); #578 “Thy Strong Word”; #937 “Lord, Bid Your Servant Go In Peace”; #585 “Lord Jesus Christ, With Us Abide”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Have you ever seen someone look at someone else and say, “Wow, he’s… different.”
That’s not usually a compliment. When someone says someone is… different… in that way, it usually means they’re saying that person is strange, or odd, or different in some way they’re not used to that makes them uncomfortable. “Different” can be a judgmental word when we use it that way. “Different” sometimes means “different from what I consider normal” or just “different from me.”
There’s good different and there’s bad different, I guess. Every one of us is different in our own way, and we really shouldn’t be judging each other on the basis of our differences, especially if the differences between us are harmless, or small, or only cosmetic. But for all the talk we hear these days about tolerance and inclusion and equity, and about “all men being created equal,” there is in fact a difference between people that can’t be overlooked. It’s not an outward difference. It has nothing to do with race or ethnicity or skin color or anything of the sort. Those are the kind of small things that shouldn’t matter to us.
The real difference between people is as clear as darkness and light, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, faithfulness and unbelief. It’s the inner difference, the “heart difference,” the Christian difference, that will finally divide us at the end of all things. God says in that reading we heard from the prophet Malachi that there is “a distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not.”
It was the difference between those things – good and evil, right and wrong, false and true - that put our Lord Jesus on the cross. Are you ready to be different? Are you willing to stand up and speak up for what’s good and godly and right and true, even if it means people might look at you and say, “Well, that’s… different…”, and not mean it in a good or complimentary way? In Jesus’ day, and in our day too, being different, being out of the mainstream, not going along with popular thought or popular culture, or even looking the powers that be in the eye and telling them they’re wrong, can get you in trouble, or even get you killed. Are you ready to be that different?
Jesus was. He was a maverick if ever there was one. All that talk about “blessed are the poor”, “blessed are the peacemakers,” “turn the other cheek”, “pick up your cross and follow Me”, and “sell all you have and give it to the poor,” sounded good to the poor people, but it made all the rich and powerful people mad. Jesus was… different. He was too different. He was dangerously different. He was direct, and He was honest to a fault, and He had a habit of telling the truth about things, even to the Sadducees and Pharisees who didn’t want to hear it. He was different. He was a radical. He wanted to change things. He overturned the money tables in their temple. He was bucking their system; and for that He had to die.
Jesus was different in a wonderful way. He was loving and merciful and kind, in a world that had forgotten mercy. He cared about people, not about wealth or money or power, and that certainly was different. He preached about heaven and grace and the love of God, and not about a list of countless laws the people had to keep. He was willing to touch the sick and the crippled and even the lepers. He sat down with the tax collectors and sinners and even ate with them. He noticed people the rest of the world ignored.
And for that, those Sadducees and Pharisees conspired against Him, had Him arrested, and brought Him in shackles to Governor Pilate, and accused Him of being the wrong kind of different - of being a rebel and an insurrectionist, of refusing to pay taxes, and of wanting to be a King. They beat Him half to death, and they put a crossbeam on His back and made Him carry it until His strength gave out and He could carry it no longer, and they brought Him to a place called Calvary and nailed Him to a cross. That was the price He paid for being… different.
And all that business in the Gospel about the green tree and the dry tree? I had to work and dig and do a little research to figure that one out, but I think I’ve got a handle on it for you. When Jesus was crucified, His Church in this world was just getting started; the holy tree was still green. Yet even then, the world was full of people who hated the God; they hated Him so much, in fact, that they took the Son God had sent to save them and nailed Him to a cross.
And if they’d do that to God’s Son when the tree was green, what would happen when the tree was dry? That is, as the years went on and Church grew, and the news about Jesus went out into the world? Jesus told His disciples, “What they do to me, they’ll do to you, as well.” It’s not only Jesus who paid the price for being different; so will you and me, if we’ll pick up our crosses and follow Him. God’s people will always face opposition for their differentness; and that opposition isn’t going to get better, only worse, as time goes on. Again, are you ready to be different?
And oh, we Christians are different, alright, and it’s our faith in Jesus that has made it so. We’ve been “rescued from the dominion of darkness,” as St. Paul says, rescued from being lost in this world full of hatred and mistrust and hopelessness and sin, and brought into “the kingdom of God’s Son,” into what Jesus called “the kingdom of light” – into God’s kingdom of goodness and light and truth. (If you want to try something really radical and different, try living by the truth in a world where almost everybody is telling lies; everyone will think you’re out of your mind!)
We’re different because we’ve been redeemed, bought back from sin and death and hell by the precious blood of Christ. We’re different because we know our sins have been forgiven; and that gives us the ability to behave in a really different way, and forgive others when they sin against us. (That’s in our Lord’s Prayer!)
We’re different because we know that we’re not our own, that these bodies of ours belong not to us, but to the God who made them. We’re different because we know we’re only strangers here, and heaven in our home. We’re different because we know the difference between what’s temporary and what’s eternal, and we’re looking up to heaven and not at the “passing away” things down here on the ground.
We’re different because we know that, although we do our best to be good citizens and support our government, we have a king named Jesus who has precedence over all earthly kingdoms, and we must obey God rather than men. (That one will be sure to land you in hot water one day, if you have the courage to be different in that way).
We’re different because we’ve been reconciled to God – made right with Him, brought to the waters of Holy Baptism and forgiven for our sins. We’re different because we have peace through the blood of Jesus, shed on the cross, that inner “peace of God that passes all human understanding” that’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t have it, too.
We Christians may not look any different on the outside. You might not be able to tell who we are just by looking at us. We don’t have halos, or wings, or a heavenly glow. But we’re different on the inside, and that’s where our real difference lies. Our hearts are different. We’re different from the inside out. There’s a wonderful Scripture passage that says God has “taken way our hearts of stone and given us hearts of flesh.” We have hearts that see the hurts in the world around us, and hearts that feel compassion for people, and hearts that are willing to help wherever we’re able to help. (Can there be such thing as a selfish Christian?)
And because our hearts have been changed, the way we look at our world is different now. We have a different world view, a biblical world view, a way of seeing the world and the future that’s waiting for us in the light of what God’s Word says. “The news doesn’t surprise me; I read about that in my Bible just yesterday.” (All the world’s “experts” will laugh at us for that one, but so be it).
And because of the love God has put in us, our relationships with the people who surround us are different (or at least they ought to be). God has poured His love into us, and that has blessed us with the power and grace to love others as God in Christ has loved us, and to forgive one another as we have been forgiven. That’s really, really different, as far as the way things normally go in this world. People get offended so easily, and they hold grudges, and they harbor resentments, and that leads to relationships being broken, and the trust every relationship needs being damaged or destroyed. Forgiveness is the key to our getting along. It’s the glue that holds our relationships together. And it’s the greatest gift we strange and weird and different Christian people have to offer our world. The “ministry of reconciliation” is what St. Paul chose to call it. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus said.
And because of what Jesus had done for us, what we put our hope in is different. We’re not hoping for fame or success or notoriety, or for the power and prestige and money that go along with those things; that’s all vanity, as King Solomon said, all hoping for things that are passing away and turning to dust. The hope we have is the hope of heaven - and we have that hope because Jesus did the most astonishing, radical, turn-the-whole-world-on-its-ear miracle of all – He was raised up from the dead.
Jesus told His disciples, more than once, “The Son of Man is going to be crucified, and after three days He will rise again.” If He’d made that claim and stayed in His tomb, that would mean He was only another faker or fraud, a liar, or a raving lunatic, and we’d have no reason to spend another minute paying attention to anything He said. And that would mean nothing in this world is different at all, and that would be so sad. As St. Paul said, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”
But, Paul goes on to say, “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” That’s why we’re different; that’s why our lives are different, and why we Christians live differently. If Jesus had stayed in His tomb, we’d all still be as lost and hopeless and joyless and sad as the rest of the world. But He was raised, and He has been raised, and He’s living still. And if Jesus claimed He’d be raised from the dead, and that turned out to be the truth, that means His claim to be the same God who created everything in the universe and all of us is true. And that means that everything else He ever said is also true – including what He said about the promise of heaven and preparing a place for us and coming to take us home again. If that doesn’t make a difference in your heart and in your life, I just don’t know what will.
Even our funerals are different now. “We do not grieve as the world grieves,” St. Paul says. Strange people that we are, we don’t say goodbye to our loved ones like so much of the world still does. (If you’ve ever been to a funeral where someone didn’t know Jesus, you know how sad that can be. It’s my goal in life to keep that from happening as much as I possibly can). Oh, we still shed tears when we lose someone -- but for us, there’s a joy-note in it, too. At our funerals, we Christians, strange people that we are, sing Easter songs! It’s the difference between losing someone forever and knowing we’ll see them again one day soon.
Are you ready to be different? Are you ready for the sideways looks, the rolling eyes, the condescending comments, that go along with being “different for Christ” in this world? Because if you are, please remember, that’s the very thing that will make a true and eternal difference in someone’s life – a difference that will reach a heart, change a life, and bring someone closer to God. Maybe someone will look at you and say, “You seem to be different somehow. Why is that?” And then you’ll have your chance, your “holy moment,” to share the Good News about Jesus. And that will make all the difference in the world!
Father in Heaven, help us to be different. Help us to be obviously different, radically different, stand-out different, in a world that needs to hear about the love of Christ. Lord, help us to be different in our outlook, different in our attitudes, different in our behavior, in a way that will make people wonder about our evident happiness and our obvious joy, and bring them to want what we have. May our differentness – our love, our forgiving spirits, our joyful hearts – bring us to the holy moment when we have a chance to share the love of Christ. And when the moment comes, help us to be strong and courageous, that we might make an eternal difference for You. In Jesus’ name; Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M. Div.
Trinity Lutheran Church, Packwaukee, WI
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Oxford, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com