Sermon: St. Irenaeus - 2020

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.