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Sermon text:
The church is divided. Heresies of all kinds are flying through the air. Pastors are badly trained and hopelessly ill-equipped to serve their people. As often as not, they’re out for money, and so are the major leaders of the church. They berate their people for their attempts to do right and promise them all kinds of good things just so long as they put a few more coins in the offering plate so that they can line their pockets and build monuments that are more for their own glory than for God’s. But that kind of money is a bit hard to come by when so few people actually attend church and care about training their children in the faith. And maybe most disturbing of all, pastors and church officials routinely get caught up in adultery and even prostitution. For the most part, the church either hides it, or passes over it with a wink and nod. Oh, yes, these are hard days for the church.
Oh, and there’s also the threat from the East. Powerful nations are aligning themselves against the traditionally Christian countries. At one point in time, distance alone was enough to guarantee some kind of security, some sense of safety. But not anymore. The days that mileage provided a hedge are long gone. Oh yes, these are hard days for God’s people.
But there’s more. There’s a pandemic ravaging the world. It’s a fearsome disease with a remarkably high death rate. It’s hard to get hold of the actual figures, but it looks like this plague has killed some 30% of the population! And Christians apparently do not have automatic immunity! Yes, these are hard days for God’s people.
Some of you may have realized this already, but I’m not actually describing our world today, not the 21st Century. I’m describing the world of the 15th and 16th Centuries, Luther’s world, the world of the Reformation. The church was in shambles, corrupted by bribery and scandal and heresy. Invaders from the Middle East were trying to sweep into Europe and stamp out Christianity. They nearly did it too, getting as far as the Danube. And the plague . . . well, the death rate was something like 60%. Pretty serious stuff.
I bring this all up because I think that Christians might just be the very best practitioners of nostalgia on the face of the earth. And Lutherans get carried away with it especially on a day like today. We celebrate the reformer himself, Luther, the seventh most written about person in human history. We celebrate the Augsburg Confession and the catechisms. We celebrate the incredible hymnody that flowed from the Reformation and the fact the Luther pretty much revived congregational singing. During his day, most music in the church had been done by choirs. It was an emphasis that would lead even to J. S. Bach! On this day, we celebrate the movement that gave rise to universal education for children, both boys and girls. The Reformation was a golden age! These were the glory days!
We celebrate the translation of the Bible from the original languages into the language of the people so that all could read the Scriptures for themselves. We celebrate the rediscovery of vocation, the incredible truth that it’s not just priests and bishops whose work pleases God, but the work of all people in all stations of life so long as they serve their neighbor! We celebrate the bravery and tenacity of Luther and the other Reformers who decided that the preaching of the pure Gospel was more important than their own lives. We celebrate the spread of that Gospel and the courage of a few national leaders who literally stuck out their necks, offering their heads to the emperor because they prized God’s mercy more than they feared the Charles’ sword. The reformation was a golden age! Looking back on days like that, on such a momentous era as that, it’s easy to get nostalgic.
But take a quick look at what actually went down, and you’ll soon realize that it was far from a glamorous time as I mentioned a few minutes ago. The Lutherans still fought and argued. The sword still often proved more persuasive to some than God’s Word. The pastors were mostly still horribly trained and scandals still rocked the church. Maybe it wasn’t so golden after all.
Of course we can do that for other times in the church too, like the days of C. F. W. Walther and company. What courage they must have had to leave their homeland and everything they knew behind, all so that they could faithfully be the church God had called them to be. That must have been the golden age! But the ship with all their money and valuables sank on the way over. A harsh winter killed a large number of them. And their bishop, Martin Stephan, their charismatic leader who led the trip over the Atlantic, turned out to be a sexual deviant who took advantage of many women in the congregation. Maybe it wasn’t so golden after all.
Well, I suppose what we have to do, then, is go back to the source. We have to go way back to the very beginning of the church when the apostles were performing miracles – when they were driving out demons, healing the sick, even raising the dead – when they were preaching with power and the Holy Spirit reached inside the hearers to set their hearts ablaze! Those were the golden days when God’s power and presence in the world were in your face, undeniable! But just read Paul’s letters to the churches in his charge and you’ll see the same things we face today – arrogance and division in the congregations, theological fights, power struggles within the church and within marriages, broken families, sexual immorality, and lies about money. Maybe it wasn’t so golden after all.
It’s so very easy for us look around at the church today and to despair, to long for the “good ol’ days”, the golden days when things were better. We long for the Glory Days! Because what we look like today is anything but glorious. Just look at your own life for a perfect case in point.
Look deep inside and you may just discover that your careful stewardship is governed more by fear than faithfulness. Look at how you spend your time and you may see that much of it is wasted on idleness, on nothing but watching the tube, browsing the internet, staring at your phone. Look how much time and energy you spend on prayers and devotion and you may find that you allot for them only the last vapors of gas you’ve got in the tank at the end of the day. Look at how you witness, and you may find that your zeal for spreading the gospel is less like Jeremiah’s burning fire in his bones, and more like a dispassionate, apathetic yawn. Oh, these are far from the glory days.
But in fact, the church has never had glory days. It has always been filled with controversy, and division, and scandal, and fear. No, the church has never lived through the glory days. But then again, that’s not really the point, is it? The point of the church is not the church. The point of the church is not to get glory for the church by its prestige, by its power, by its artistic creations and beautiful architecture. The point of the church is not to get glory for the church by its good works, by it acts of mercy, by its bold condemnation of injustice and evil in the world. No, the point of the church is not to get glory for the church. The point of the church is to get glory for God. And believe it or not . . . that’s exactly what it does. God gets glory even through His messed up, torn, battered, muddied, bleeding church that we call the Church Militant.
God gets glory from the church because by sticking with us hopeless sinners, He demonstrates His faithfulness. God gets glory because by forgiving our sins, and often the same stupid sins, again and again and again, He demonstrates His mercy. God gets glory because by filling us with His Spirit, by giving His Son’s own body and blood, by calling us creatures of dust and ash His children and bestowing on us mortals immortality, He shows forth His wondrous grace.
God’s not proud, you see. This is the kind of glory that He desires. He even gets glory when we in our faltering, bumbling, tripping way strive to do what He calls us to do. In resisting a temptation, in visiting the sick and lonely, in tithing, in telling a child about the love of Jesus, in a quiet prayer said with a stranger beaten down by this sinful world, in a grandmother serving breakfast, and grandfather telling a story, a father blowing a nose, a mother enrolling her children at a Christian school despite the cost . . . in all these little things done imperfectly by His children, God gets glory.
No, these days certainly don’t look so golden. They don’t look so glorious. But that’s because we’re looking in all the wrong places. It’s not about us. It’s not about the church. It’s about God, our Refuge and Strength, and it’s about His Christ. You see these are the glory days as have been all the days of the church. Because in this church, “God richly and daily forgives my sins and the sins of all believers and sanctifies and keeps her in the one true faith. And on the Last Day He will raise me and all the dead, and give eternal life to me and all believers in Christ. This is most certainly true.”
And so Paul says that our boasting, it’s excluded. Take it a step further – our searching and longing for the glory days of the church, it’s excluded. It’s excluded because, as Paul writes, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
God says, “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” He will be exalted in the earth. He will be glorified in and through His church. He will be glorified by our toddler attempts at doing His will. He will be glorified by giving His gift of mercy. He will be glorified by His faithful presence in and with His broken church. Are you longing and pining for the glory days? Then rejoice! The glory days were in the early church, the glory days were in the Reformation, the glory days were in the beginnings of the LCMS, the glory days are now – because by His grace God is glorified. Amen.