27 June 2020
Text: Luke 11:33-36 (1 John
2:18-25)
In the name of +
Jesus. Amen.
St.
Irenaeus is one of our heroes of the faith. The western Christian world remembers him today.
And this is one reason the world hates
us, dear brothers and sisters: we remember. We love our fathers and mothers who came
before us. We don’t try to eradicate
their memory, but to the contrary, we believe the commandment to “honor your
father and your mother” applies to our history as well.
Irenaeus
was born only a century after our Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross and rose
again. He served in the pastoral ministry
and was made bishop in the city that is today known as Lyons, France. He was a faithful bishop who fought for the
faith against heresies, and in fact, we still read his book called by that very
name today: Against Heresies.
His
pastor was Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, who died as a martyr at the stake at the
age of 86 rather than renounce his faith in Jesus. And St. Polycarp was himself taught directly
by St. John the Apostle – the disciple whom Jesus loved, witness of the
crucifixion and resurrection, and author of four books of the New Testament.
Irenaeus
believed in truth, and it is our duty as Christians to seek the truth, to know
the truth, and to confess the truth – whether it is popular or not. We know the truth because of the witnesses to
that truth – the truth of Jesus. And
even this early on in Christian history, St. Irenaeus looked to the Gospels and
the genuine books of the New Testament to contend for that truth against
heretics who wandered away from the truth of the Christian Church as taught by
faithful bishops – men like himself who learned the faith from men who learned
it from the apostles.
Our
Lord teaches us, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a
basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light.” We often speak of coming to a knowledge of
the truth as “enlightenment.” And in the
Christian faith, enlightenment is not a mystical Zen moment, but it comes from
the Light of the Word of God, along with guidance by the Holy Spirit. We recite in the Catechism that the Holy Spirit,
“calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian Church on
earth.” And this word “enlightens” that Dr.
Luther employs in both Latin and German is the very word our Lord uses here. Truth is the light. We put the truth on display, and it gives us
a clear picture of reality. Darkness is
the very opposite, dear friends. In the
darkness, we cannot experience reality, and so we must either guess or lie
about reality. Darkness is the realm of Satan. Some people are more comfortable with the
lies they tell themselves in the dark, rather than to allow the Holy Spirit to illuminate
their way to the truth.
St.
Irenaeus battled a heresy called Gnosticism. This weird mix of paganism and Christianity
taught that there was secret knowledge that only a few supposedly enlightened
people had. But they would not put this
supposed light on a lampstand, but rather you had to join them and put your
trust in them and their cult before you could become supposedly enlightened.
Dear
brothers and sisters, our Lord Jesus Christ never operated this way. He taught openly about the kingdom of God. He preached Scripture. He preached that which God had revealed to
us. He exposed the darkness with light,
and He comforted those who sat in darkness by the illumination of the Gospel. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.” And it is the light of Christ that St. John
confessed, that St. Polycarp preached, and that St. Irenaeus taught. We Christians today teach the same faith,
preach the same good news, and illuminate the world with the same Christ – Jesus
Christ, “the same yesterday and today and forever.”
You
might not be aware of this, but Gnosticism has a great deal of influence today. One of the fathers of modern psychiatry, Carl
Jung, was a student of this ancient heresy, who dabbled in the occult, and integrated
much of this weird cult into his theories about the human mind. Sadly, even a lot of Christians have lingering
Gnosticism.
One
example is this idea that when you die, you go to heaven, where you will float
around as a spirit for eternity. This is
the Gnostic heresy, for the Gnostics hated the material, they hated the body,
they saw the highest good as separation from the body – which is what we call
death. Gnosticism is a dark religion
that denies the Lord’s creation of matter as “good.” Dear friends, there is a reason why the Nicene
Creed ends with “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the
world to come.” We Christians teach the
physical, bodily resurrection, because that is what Jesus did Himself, and that
is what Jesus promises to us.
The
word “look for” in Latin is “exspecto.” It
literally means to watch out for, but it is where we get our English word “to
expect.” We expect the bodily resurrection,
and we are watching out for it. We yearn
for it, and we are convinced of its reality – because we have been enlightened
by the Holy Spirit to believe the Word of God. And this we believe, teach, and confess.
St.
Irenaeus would not compromise with the Gnostics on this point. It separates us Christians from every other
religion in the world.
Irenaeus’s
bishop’s bishop, John the apostle teaches us the importance of the flesh. We worship a God who takes on a physical body –
something repugnant to the Gnostics – and even to the Jews and the Muslims
today. John says, “No one who denies the
Son has the Father.” He speaks of “antichrists”
who deny the fleshly incarnation of Jesus. These antichrists of John’s day included Gnostics,
who taught a weird, spiritual Christ rather than the physical Jesus who walked
out of His own grave and miraculously comes to us materially in His body and
blood.
Irenaeus’s
study of Scripture convinced him that before our Lord’s return, there would be
a major antichrist figure known as the beast in the Book of Revelation, without
whose mark, no-one will be able to buy or sell.
This
is why we must remain faithful, dear friends, for St. John Himself says, “It is
the last hour.” He exhorts us to “Let
what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in
you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that He made to us –
eternal life.”
We
honor our fathers in the faith, including St. Irenaeus, not because he taught
something new, something novel, but precisely because he didn’t. He was faithful to Polycarp, who was faithful
to John, who was faithful to Christ – the Light of the World who enlightens us
through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who draws us to the Word. And unlike the Word of the Gnostic faith, this
Word “became flesh and dwelt among us,” as St. John proclaims, a teaching that
is repugnant to the Gnostics, old and new, and to unbelievers in our world
today.
And
so, dear friends, in these days of darkness, let us look to Irenaeus, who
defended the truth, who proclaimed the Light of Christ, the Word Made Flesh, in
whom we abide.
The
Church teaches the same faith, the same truth, offers the same enlightenment, and
bids us in the same way to abide in the Son and in the Father through the
ministry of the Holy Spirit.
Abide,
dear friends! Remain faithful! As St. Irenaeus teaches us, do not wander off
into the darkness, but remain in the light.
And
in the words of the hymn, we pray:
Lord Jesus Christ, with us
abide,
For round us falls the
eventide.
O let Your Word, that
saving light,
Shine forth undimmed into
the night.
In these last days of great
distress
Grant us, dear Lord, true
steadfastness
That we keep pure till life
is spent
Your holy Word and Sacrament.
Amen.
In the name of the Father
and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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