Sermon: Wittenberg Academy – Oct 8

8 October 2019

Text: Matt 10:1-23

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

“Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” says our Lord.  This is remarkably practical advice for just about any station in life.  Wisdom is a constant theme throughout Scripture, but this serpentine wisdom might be better understood as “shrewdness.”  The last thing we Christians need to be is naïve.  For while the world builds its worldview on the belief that there is good in everybody, and that mankind has the ability to evolve and, and that “day by day in every way, I am getting better and better,” we Christians, who believe that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, know too well the effects and ravages of sin.

Mankind is not getting better, not evolving, and no amount of education, programming or threats of being sent to the Gulag labor camp will transform us into something we are not.  Not even the Chinese-style social credit system can transform the hearts of man.  We human beings are what we are: creatures created in the image of God, who have fallen, but who are given the free gift of redemption that can be received in faith.

Knowing this helps us to make sense of our world. 

But we are also to be innocent as doves.  Being wise in the worldly sense doesn’t mean we embrace the world’s ways, for we renounced all of that at our baptism: the devil and his works and ways.  We are followers of Jesus, and we are led to Him by the Holy Spirit, who descended in the form of a dove.  The dove is the symbol of peace and reconciliation, even from the time of the ark of Noah, when the dove returned with an olive branch, and the Lord painted the rainbow on the canvas of the sky to remind us of the covenant of His grace.

Interestingly, dear brothers and sisters, the immediate context of our Lord’s advice is for the persecuted church.  Our Blessed Lord is sending the apostles out into a world of hatred and persecution – not unlike the world we are living in today – even as the days grow darker and our culture becomes more and more unhinged, repressive, and violent.   “Behold,” says our Lord, “I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves.”  He elaborates that those who preach and confess the Gospel will be dragged into court, punished, threatened, and remanded to the tender mercies of a hostile government.  And when this happens, dear friends, we are to become instruments through which the Holy Spirit will testify of Jesus.

And our Lord assures us of His presence and invites us to be free of anxiety, for what we will say will be “given to [us] in that hour.”  Yes, we will be betrayed by our families and we will be hated.  “But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” 

Let us comfort one another by these words, and may our Blessed Lord fortify us in Word and Sacrament, according to the Spirit’s conviction and in the Father’s mercy. 

Amen.

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