Sermon: St. Augustine - 2019

28 August 2019

Text: 2 Tim 4:1-8 (Matt 5:13-19)

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Today, dear brothers and sisters, we remember a beloved brother in Christ, Augustine of Hippo Regius in Northern Africa.  He was one of the most extraordinary theologians and preachers in the history of the Church.  He died on this date 1,589 years ago.  But what’s a few centuries for us Christians?  We are the people of eternity.

And we are also people of gratitude.  We are grateful for the heroes in the faith who came before us.  This word “grateful” is based on the Latin word for “grace,” and when we think of St. Augustine’s preaching, that is what we think about.  Augustine understood that the Christian faith is all about grace.  He understood original sin.  He understood why the Trinity is so important, and why the cross is central to everything in our day to day lives.  

Bishop Augustine knew this not just as an intellectual or as a churchman.  He understood it as a sinner who was redeemed by Christ.  As a young man, he departed from both the Pagan faith of his father Patrick, and the Christian faith of his mother Monica.  He was involved in a religious cult, and lived a life of selfish pleasure and hedonistic sexuality.  But Monica prayed every day for her son.  And ultimately, it was the preaching of Monica’s pastor, Bishop Ambrose, who proclaimed the Gospel with the clarity of any Lutheran pastor who would follow in his train a thousand years later.  And by the way, St. Monica’s prayers were answered concerning her husband Patrick, who converted to Christianity before his death.

It was the preaching of Christ the crucified one, the preaching of the Gospel of forgiveness, that won over Augustine.  It was the Word of God – as it always is – that converted him.  He would enter the holy ministry himself, and his sermons are still studied to this day.  He became a bishop and world-famous theologian.

Augustine took heed of the Holy Scriptures, especially our epistle lesson in which St. Paul exhorts all preachers: “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the Word; we ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.”

And did Augustine ever preach (and teach and write and speak) God’s Word!  Augustine’s clarity gave us a vocabulary to talk about original sin, the idea of the “just war,” and how we should behave as Christians when our country and culture seem to be coming apart.  Augustine lived in the days of the fall of Rome.  People were in despair.  And they turned to their pastor and his proclamation of Jesus for comfort. 

For it is just in such times, dear friends, that we need solid preaching.  “For,” St. Paul says, “the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”

Augustine was a former Manichaean.  This was an ancient cult that appealed to the intellect.  Because of his former belief in such things, and now able to see through them, Augustine wrote many books to defend the Christian faith against heresies.  These books are still used in seminaries today.

Augustine was an expert in philosophy, but his true gift was understanding the Holy Scriptures.  He took St. Paul’s exhortation to heart, and preached the Word of God, in season and out of season.  He would debate anyone.  He was honest about his former life.  His preaching focused on Christ and His work of atoning for our sins.  Augustine’s sermons were so important that some 350 of them were preserved, copied by hand throughout the centuries, and are still read today.

In good times and in bad, we Christians are to be the “salt of the earth.”  We must never lose our zest.  We are not called to get along with the world, but rather to speak the truth and give the world hope.  We are called to be the “light of the world.”  We are surrounded by darkness, dear friends, even as Rome was collapsing in Augustine’s day.  Today, our western civilization seems to be crumbling in an ungodly implosion of ignorance and the loss of a moral compass.  It is just for this time that we need to let our light shine, looking to those like Augustine, who courageously took on the challenges to the Christian faith of his day.

This is not to say, dear friends, that we all must be theologians.  Far from it!  We are called to many vocations.  God places us into many and various callings and contact with people who need to hear the good news, with people who desperately want the hope that is ours by grace.  We are surrounded by darkness and a culture of death, and we, dear brothers and sisters, have the antidote.  We have the cure to death itself!

The people around us will not find hope in politics or hedonism or false religions.  Their hope is not to be found in technology or escapism.  Their hope is in the name of the Lord.  Their hope is found in the preaching and teaching of Augustine, because Augustine was a faithful preacher of Christ and Him crucified!

And in times of darkness, the Lord will raise up great prophetic voices like Malachi and Paul, like Ambrose and Augustine, like Luther and the many proclaimers of Christ in our own day.  The Lord will not suffer His Word to lay fallow.  For even when the darkness seems to be choking us to death, remember, dear friends, that the Word of God cannot be extinguished.  The Word of God has free rein.  The Word of God does not return void!  

And the Word of God is preached, proclaimed by men who have themselves been called out of darkness, man who know what it is to be forgiven, men who have lived according to hedonism and false religiosity and have found them wanting.

Let us pray that the Lord of the Church raise up more Augustines in our day, dear brothers and sisters.  We need faithful preachers who will indeed proclaim Christ courageously and soundly, who will be sober-minded in their teaching, who will endure suffering in their confession, who will do the work of an evangelist in their love for the lost, and who will fulfill their ministry by the grace of God.

Let us thank God for St. Augustine and his sound teaching, for St. Monica his mother for her tireless prayers, for St. Ambrose, whose own faithful preaching in season and out of season was used by God to bring Augustine into the Christian faith, and of course, let us thank Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.