Sermon: Maundy Thursday - 2020

9 April 2020

Text: 1 Cor 11:23-32

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

“For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.”

Dear brothers and sisters, Maundy Thursday begins the Triduum, the three-day pinnacle of Holy Week leading to Easter Sunday.  We reconnect with our Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection beginning with this annual remembrance in which He gave us His body and blood to eat and to drink for the forgiveness of sins, the strengthening of our faith, and to bring us into a physical communion with God.

The Lord authorized the apostles – those who were “sent” (that is what the word “apostle” means in Greek) – to preach and to administer the sacraments.  And this is why the Church focuses on mission work, for the Lord works through His Word, and as St. Paul teaches us, “faith comes by hearing… the Word of Christ.”  And people can’t believe unless they hear, and they can’t hear without someone preaching to them, and they can’t have preachers unless they are “sent.” 

St. Paul came to things very late.  Jesus ordained him into the ministry after His resurrection and ascension into heaven, appearing to him on the road to Damascus.  St. Paul became the 13^th apostle, but he certainly was one of the sent ones who preached the Gospel to the ends of the known world, and left us the Word of God in half of the New Testament of which he is the human author.

St. Paul was called to preach and administer the sacraments in the churches he established, and through Holy Communion, our Lord Jesus Christ remains physically present with His people, whether they are gathering in Corinth, Philippi, Antioch, or even Gretna.  The Church has the commission from Jesus to call pastors, men who are called by the Holy Spirit and ordained by other pastors, so that they too may hear the Word of Christ and believe, so they too may partake of the Holy Supper.

But how easy it is, dear friends, to take this gift for granted.  In normal circumstances, we can take communion any time.  Our church offers the sacrament every Sunday and every Wednesday.  And if you are laid up at home or in the hospital, the pastor can typically visit you with the Holy Scriptures and the body and blood of Jesus.  He can absolve you with the authority of one who has been sent.  Jesus is generous in making these gifts available, and it is easy to cheapen them in our sinful flesh – even to the point of skipping church if we have something more interesting to do.  

Sadly, not just in our parish, but all across our country and even in Europe – where most of us have our roots, where most of our ancestors became Christians, where St. Paul was the first to bring the Gospel – we see the churches emptying and closing.  The old die off, and the young have better things to do than to worship, than to hear the Word, than to receive Christ’s body and blood.  And it isn’t only the young.  The faith is just not that important to many people anymore, especially when they can turn on the TV and attend “St. Mattress,” watching a TV preacher say who knows what?  We can today stay at home and “read our Bibles” (which we should in addition to attending the Divine Service), we can worship God on the golf course or while sleeping in, because God is everywhere, right?

God is everywhere, but He is there for you, dear friends, where He has promised to be there for you: in the preached Word and in the Holy Sacraments.  And that is why He established the Church – which means, the “assembly.”  Christianity is not a hobby or a spectator sport.  Christianity is the people of God who gather week after week around a Christian pulpit to hear one of those who has been sent to preach the saving Word; who gather around the Christian font to be reminded that they have been baptized and set apart from the world; and the Christian altar to receive what one of the early Christian bishops and preachers, St. Ignatius of Antioch, called “the medicine of immortality.”

And indeed, now more than ever, dear friends, the world understands that we need medicine, and the world must come to grips with every person’s mortality.  

We are still in a state of shock to have nearly every Christian church on the planet shuttered – even in this holy season of Lent, and even extending to the annual worldwide celebration of our Lord’s resurrection.  We are like the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness and later exiled to Babylon.  This is a time of self-examination, even as we should be doing each week before receiving communion, as St. Paul says, “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.  For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.”

Have we been too lax in our self-examination?  Have we taken the assembling of the saints together around Word and Sacrament for granted?  Has the Christian Church around the world become complacent?  We cannot look into the hidden will of God, but for whatever reason, our Lord has allowed this horrific situation to come to pass – both upon the unbeliever and the believer.  The blessings that we have come to accept as normal –24-hour access to grocery stores, the freedom to travel and enjoy wealth that kings of 200 years ago would envy, the simple pleasure of a sit-down meal in a restaurant, the ability to greet our loved ones, or even the opportunity to attend a Divine Service and hear the Word preached, and to partake of Holy Communion – have been temporarily revoked from us.

St. Paul tells us – under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit – that lax self-examination in our communion practices can make us “weak and ill” and that as a result, “some have died.”  Sin itself is a dangerous virus.

We would do well to examine ourselves and reassess our priorities.  We would do well to repent.

Bishop Vsevolod Lytkin heard about a small group of Lutherans of Polish descent who had been exiled to a remote Siberian village in the 1930s under Stalin’s purge.  Their pastor had been shot.  Their church – and all Lutheran church buildings – were closed and permanently destroyed.  This little flock had no pastor.  They only had emergency baptisms and parents teaching the Catechism to the younger people who were born and who grew up under government persecution.  No pastor meant no communion – for decades.

The Bishop met an elderly woman from this village who told him that she had waited her entire life to meet a pastor.  She had never had the opportunity to take Holy Communion.  She knew the Catechism.  She confessed that Christ was truly present in the Sacrament of the Altar.  The Bishop was able to give her the body and blood of Christ.  She was then ready to depart in peace.

Again, we don’t know why this severe judgment is taking place at this time.  We must examine ourselves.  We must repent.  But we do know that we think we have all the answers.  We put our trust in our technology and our “can-do” American spirit.  Some are even taking it upon themselves to say the words of institution over bread and wine at home – sometimes with the help of livestreaming technology – as a way to resist this judgment.  Rather than submit to the temporary chastening of the Lord, they are looking for workarounds.  And shamefully, there are a few pastors participating in this fraud.  Ironically, these congregations typically downplay the importance of Holy Communion, even to the point of celebrating it in a casual way, celebrating it infrequently, even taking it upon themselves to use chemically altered grape juice instead of what our Lord instructs us to use: wine.  Rebellious mankind always thinks he knows better than God.  This goes back to the tower of Babel, and even further back to the Fall in Eden.  Will we ever learn, dear friends?

Our doctors tell us that we will not get through this crisis without “social distancing.”  And in a sense, we have been “social distanced” from receiving what St. Paul received from the Lord and delivered to us.

Dear brothers and sisters, this is a time of judgment.  And so let us humbly repent.  Let us turn to the Lord in search of forgiveness and restoration, and the eradication of this virus.

Let us take to heart the Lord’s word given by St. Paul who was sent to preach the Word to us: “If we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged.  But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.”

Let us receive this discipline with gratitude for what our Lord has done for us at the cross, and with faith in His promise to save us and to once more send the “sent” ones to us – whether we are in a remote village in Siberia or on the outskirts of a prosperous American city.  Let us repent, and let us look to our restoration – even as we celebrate this coming Sunday – whether with Holy Communion or not – our Lord’s resurrection from the dead; His triumph over sin, death, and the devil; and His promise to be with us always even to the end of the world.

Amen.

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