Sermon: Trinity 4- 2020

5 July 2020

Text: Luke 6:36-42

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

As we sang together in the words of the Psalmist: “Though an army may encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war should rise against me, in this I will be confident.” 

It has been a long time since we have faced this kind of pressing cultural and political siege that threatens to tear down our country and society.  Everything that our forebears held dear is under assault.  Good is called evil, and evil, good.  And even our institutions that are supposed to uphold the rule of law – based on the natural law itself – are rotten, and foisting upon us phony laws and executive orders and judicial rulings not based in reality.

The real enemy of this revolution is the Church.  It always has been.  We have lived through similar revolutions in the past: the Reign of Terror in France in 1794, and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917.  The real enemy of the revolution is not statues and history, but rather Jesus Himself.  And if they hate Jesus, they hate the followers of Jesus.  This is nothing new.

We also sang the faithful words of King David: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?  When the wicked came against me, my enemies and foes, they stumbled and fell.”

Ultimately, Christ is the victor, and the Church is triumphant.  But before we become part of the Church Triumphant, dear brothers and sisters, we fight in this fallen world, this battleground, as the Church Militant.

We Christians may well be called upon to defend civilization, especially in our various callings in life.  A Christian policeman may be called upon to use a baton and tear-gas to keep order.  A Christian soldier may be called upon to defend our civilization and country with firearms and bombs.  Christians may be called upon to physically defend the weak.  But Christians as Christians, Christians as the Church, are called to confess the truth, to love our enemies, and to pray.  We do not win by adopting the methods of our enemies and forcing them to believe as we do – if that were even possible.  We do not win the war by humiliating our enemies, though that is what they do to us.  We are not called upon to harass those who harass us, to menace those who menace us, to vandalize, to riot, to loot, and to intimidate.  In this war, we don’t win by killing the enemy.

We are called to be a different kind of warrior.  We are called to be steadfast in our faith.  We are called to be confessors.  We are called be true to our Lord.  We are not called to fight with our fists, but with open hands of prayer, trusting in the Lord to vindicate us.  This is not to say that we are pacifists.  There is a time to use force to defend ourselves and others.  But we do not go looking for dragons to slay.  

In fact, in this form of battle to which we are called, we must always be on guard against the enemy within ourselves.  For Satan uses the Trojan Horse of self-righteousness to destroy us from the inside.  This was the weakness of the Pharisees, who were devout, religious, pious, and generous in their religious life.  But as our Lord pointed out, they were rotten to the core.  Reality did not match their self-image.  And though they had the external appearance of righteousness, they were actually hypocrites.  

Our Lord warns us against this very thing, dear friends.  “Be merciful,” says our Lord, “even as your Father is merciful.”  To be merciful, even to our enemies, is a paradox.  Indeed, there is a time to fight, but there is also a time to forgive.  The end goal is not to annihilate our enemies, but to show them a “more excellent way” and to pray for their conversion.  

At one time, Saul of Tarsus was the Church’s worst enemy.  He was the Antifa thug of his own day.  He collaborated with the wicked government to root out and arrest Christians.  He went door to door and seized them: men, women, and children.  These Christians were not merely written a citation and given a fine.  They were often executed.  But Saul of Tarsus encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus.  We know him today, of course, as St. Paul, by whom the Holy Spirit caused thirteen books of the New Testament to be written.

The confessors of our Lord won the battle with their enemy Saul, not by killing him, but by confessing the truth to him.  The Holy Spirit converted him.  Jesus spoke to him.  And the apostle Paul himself would be martyred for the faith as its greatest confessor and preacher.

“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you,” says our Lord.

When He says, “Judge not,” he isn’t telling us that there is no right or wrong.  He is not telling us to consider evil and good to be the same thing.  He is not telling us that we cannot serve as civil jurors or judges.  He is not telling us that we cannot punish our children for bad behavior.  Rather he is telling us how to relate to other sinners.

We judge actions based on the revealed Word of God and the natural law written in our hearts.  We don’t excuse evil.  We condemn sin, we don’t excuse it.  But we are not called to judge or condemn a person.  That is what God does.  We are called to speak the truth in love, and to exercise right judgment regarding sin, but not to judge or condemn the sinner himself.  Instead, we are called to forgive and to be generous, even with our enemies.

Our enemies – under the direction of the enemy – distort our Lord’s words, as if we Christians are not supposed to discern between good and evil, nor confess the truth, nor point out error to the erring as an act of love.  They apply the “judge not” to mean anything goes, and the Christian may not speak the Word of God to confess the truth.  

By contrast, our Lord bids us to wage this war knowing that we are ourselves poor, miserable sinners.  We too need to repent of our sins.  We too need to confess our transgressions.  We too need the grace and mercy of God.  For our righteousness is not our own; it is Christ’s.  We are the Church not because we are righteous, but rather because we are not.  We have been rescued.  We are covered by the blood of the Lamb.  We are redeemed by the cross.  We are renewed by Holy Baptism and the proclamation of the Gospel.  We have nothing to boast about other than Christ alone.  And that Good News is the Church’s weapon, a weapon which has the power to transform a Saul into a Paul, and to win people over, according to God’s will.

It is not our job to convert anyone.  We don’t have the power to do it.  But we are called to confess the Word of God.  And there is power in that Word.  The rest is up to the Holy Spirit. 

We are called to repent of our own hypocrisy.  For how many unbelievers have used this hypocrisy as an excuse not to examine the truth of what we confess to be true?  “How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye.”  If you want to be an effective confessor of the faith, if you want to be a warrior of the Church, if you want to serve the Lord in the midst of this warfare, the best thing you can do is to repent.  Adopt a spirit of humility, and give glory only to our Lord.

“Though an army may encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war should rise against me, in this I will be confident.”  Our confidence, dear friends, is in the Word, in the cross, in God’s grace.  Let us repent every day, and let us wage war on the enemy within, so that we may indeed serve our Lord with a militant righteousness that is not our own, but His alone.  To Him be glory alone.  Amen.

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