Sermon for 175th Anniversary of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Wartburg Tennessee, at Vespers, Oct. 1, 2022

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

People loved by God, especially my dear Pastor Graves, all you members of St. Paul Wartburg, Bishop Paavola, reverend fathers of the clergy, all you friends of this parish and her honored guests, indeed all who are gathered to celebrate this joyous anniversary: as you well know, in the history of our country 175 years is nothing to sneeze at! This congregation was founded when the United States was not even 75 years old. The horrors of the War Between the States was still more than a decade away. Why, Iowa had just been admitted to the union as the 29th state the year previous. The President at the time was James Polk (himself a Tennessee man and even former governor of the Volunteer State). Also that self-same year, by happy circumstance, a bunch of Lutherans meeting in Chicago formed something they called The German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States (which would later be known as the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod). Ha! Yes, I guess you could say, that your congregation and the Synod are ecclesiastical twins. Both have been around for quite a bit. And yet…

As great a time as 175 years seems in the perspective of our country today, you do realize that it is just the blink of an eye in the long history of Christ’s Church. Your community is called Wartburg, and so we remember that it was at the Wartburg Castle in Eisenach that Luther began translating the Bible into German 500 years ago, starting a widespread movement that still goes on to this day to put the Word of God into the language and hands of ordinary Christian people. Your Lutheran heritage links you back to that and to all the great events of the Reformation in the 16th century.But being Lutheran specifically has always meant seeing yourselves as the heirs of the faith that has come down to us from the time of the Apostles.  True, we count Luther as one of the fathers of our Church, but even so we count St. Augustine, St. Athanasius, and even the great Popes St. Leo and St. Gregory, and so many others. To be Lutheran has always meant that our faith connects us like a branch to the vine of Christ’s Church from the Book of Acts, growing and spreading the Word across all the intervening centuries right down to the this present. As Lutherans we do not believe that the Church perished or went underground at the death of St. John, the last apostle, until old Luther finally came along and breathed some new life into her. God forbid! Luther himself would shudder with horror at any such a notion. No, to be Lutheran is to know ourselves as the heirs of the great Church Catholic from the days she was undivided, and then after the sad Schism of 1054 that sundered East and West, we are solidly of the West. Put most simply, Lutherans are not afraid of church history. We read it as our family story. We are self-consciously Western Catholic Christians. Ours is a Church reformed and cleansed by the Gospel in the 16th century, but not the start of some new venture in those days!

So 175 years ago, your spiritual forebears, the venerable founders of this holy house, planted right here in Wartburg Tennessee St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. Oh, they knew well enough that there were other Christians around, other churches where they could have heard something of God’s Word preached and some even where they could have received the Sacraments. But those old Lutherans wanted what has always gotten us into hot water with fellow members of the Body of Christ: they wanted the Word to be preached among them in its pristine purity, straight from the Scripture with the adulteration of any human philosophy adding anything or taking anything away from what it says. No matter how crazy the Word might sound, they believed it, and they wanted it delivered straight with no dilution. They wanted to be able to celebrate the Sacraments just as Jesus gave them to us: Baptism as His act whereby He washes away our sins, joins us to His death and resurrection, and  clothes us in His very own holiness. They wanted to be able to hold the Supper as Christ instituted it, neither some mere memorial meal nor a sacrifice for the sins of the living and the dead, but instead the very gift of His own body and blood into our mouths for the forgiveness of our sins. Yes, we do indeed remember Christ in the Eucharist, but we remember a present Lord, not an absent one. Your spiritual forebears wanted the freedom to raise their children in this faith that had been handed on to them, summarized so beautiful and clearly in the Small Catechism. And so they couldn’t just go and join with the neighboring Churches or Christians that held things which they believed contradicted or in some way compromised the Word of God. Nor would it have been right to try sneak in and change the others in their churches. They knew it wasn’t safe to ignore their consciences, not when consciences are bound to the Word of God, as Dr. Luther confessed before Emperor Charles V, 501 years ago. The only solution was the founding of a Lutheran parish and so they did and bequeathed to you this wonderful heritage to which you are heirs.

Now there has always been the danger of us Lutherans provoking in our fellow Christians the thought: “Oh, so you Lutherans, you all think you are better than the rest of us, don’t you?” But as we’ll confess tomorrow in the Divine Service, we most certainly do NOT believe that. We know that we are poor, miserable sinners who have deserved from God both His temporal and eternal punishment: death and damnation are our due. We do not put ourselves as better than anyone else. We know we’re not. But it is because we are poor, miserable sinners that we cannot let be taken from us the pure sweet Gospel from which we live, the good news of the sinner’s free justification by the blood of Jesus, His cross atoning for the sin of this entire world, His death destroying the power of death forever. Further, as you well know, some of our fellow Christians have even questioned whether we Lutherans are Christians at all, since we flat out deny that the making a human decision is the essence of being born again. We know that’s not how anyone is born again, and we cannot stand by and pretend that His sacraments are merely something WE do in obedience to Him. We know that first and foremost they are His divine gifts by which He reaches to us a participation, a communion in His own divine life. And so to be a Lutheran Christian has always meant, my dear friends, to run that risk of appearing aloof, or being considered subChristian simply because while we are willing compromise on absolutely anything that arises from ourselves, we can and will NEVER compromise one jot or tittle of what Christ has entrusted to us. We literally LIVE from His gifts.

So, people loved by God, I think the venerable founders of this holy house would be overjoyed at hearing the Old Testament reading for today. Like Solomon of old, they knew that God is not contained in any house built by human hands. “Surely in temples made with hands God the most high is not dwelling. High above earth His temple stands, all earthly temples excelling.” But they also knew that some God who is merely everywhere is as useless as a God who is nowhere; what human beings need and must have is a God who is somewhere. A God who locates Himself, who appoints a place for His people to come where they can come together to meet Him, to receive His forgiveness, share His peace and taste His joy, and so live in fellowship with Him. Solomon’s temple provided that for the Old Testament people of God, but it was itself a picture, pointing to a greater reality. Do you remember the conversation between Jesus and St. Photini, the traditional name of the woman at the Samaritan well? When the conversation got a little hot and Jesus had let slip that he knew the whole scoop about her life, Photini tries to deflect Him with a question about the proper place for worship. Jesus tells her that the hour is coming when worship will not be hither or thither, neither Samaria or Jerusalem, though Jerusalem was indeed the legitimate place of God’s divine service at the time. In the future Christ was bringing in even at that time: those who worship God (the Father) will worship in Spirit (Holy Spirit) and in Truth (I am the way, the TRUTH, and the life). The Father seeks those who will worship Him by faith given by the Spirit in the truth revealed by Jesus. This worship then is carried out into all the world, not restricted to this location. It flows out wherever the streams of the means of grace go, wherever the Word is read and purely proclaimed and taught, wherever Baptism is administered in the Triune name, wherever sinners make confession and are absolved in the name of Christ, wherever the Body and Blood of Jesus go into sinful mouths and souls, beneath the appearance of bread and wine, bringing for the forgiveness of sins. You don’t have to go to Jerusalem to go to the temple anymore. It’s not there anyway. But wherever there is a Church, wherever the people of God come together around these means of grace, there heaven still touches down right here upon the earth, and you gather about these springs of the water of life and partake of them and they continually make you a new people, the people of the age to come.

But make no mistake about this, people loved by God, to live from the life of the age that is coming through the Means of Grace is to partake of a life that is alien and threatening to the people who have settled down in this age and neither know nor want another. If I may put it so, you smell peculiar to them. You reek of resurrection. They can sniff out that alien life that you’re living from and their natural impulse is to avoid it or try to get rid of it.  From the beginning of the preaching of the Gospel, it has always brought trouble on the heads of those who believed it and proclaimed it. Jesus warned it would be so, and His apostles clearly taught that this is actually normal in this age. And painful as it is, Christians have always borne it with what looks to the world like a ridiculous giddy joy. You know why. You heard it in the second reading: God is for you, not against you. He gave His only Son, and with Him He will give you absolutely everything. No one’s going to condemn you or even bring a charge against you since God is your justifier and Christ Jesus who paid for all your sins is interceding for you this very moment at the right hand of God. So nothing, folks, nothing in all creation, nothing you will ever go through, no tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword, nothing whatsoever has the power to sunder you from the love God has given you in Christ Jesus. You really are more than conquerors.

And so, people loved by God, you do indeed hold all the Words that Jesus gave you. You seek to hold them in your hearts and in your minds at all times. And you know that He spoke them precisely so that in Him we might have peace. Yes, in this world we know there will be trouble. Lots of it. Not only people hating the life of Christ in us, but also the myriad sorrows that sweep over us in this fallen age: death and grief, sickness and pain, disappointments and tears. They come to you as they come to everyone, but through the gift of the Word and the Sacraments you can have peace. Peace in Christ because in Him you know that your sins have all been answered for and that the sins of the entire world have been covered by His holy blood. Peace in Christ because we know that He, your Jesus, sits on the throne of this universe and that nothing ever overtakes you unless it come from His hand. You sing with peace: “No poison can be in the cup that my Physician sends me.” Peace in Christ because you know that whenever death comes and takes your last breath, it can’t and won’t take away the life which is yours in Christ. Into you has gone His incorruptible Body and Blood and He will do as He promised: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise up on the last day.” Yes, though your body slumber for a while in the earth, your soul will live and on that Last Day, you will be bodily raised and your soul returned to its body and you will stand with the Blessed Virgin Mother and all the saints and angels around and before the throne and join in the victory hymn of the Lamb that never ends.

So, “Holy lovely is Your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!” Jesus has this congregation right here in this place that all of this might be given to the poor sinners who gather here, and that you might offer it to those whom you invite to gather with you and to meet the Man who told you all you ever did. Your Jesus. As they gather with you at the means of grace, at the joyous points where heaven touches down on earth and God still dwells with man, Jesus comes. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” You can count on that! And so, people loved by God, you have very a bright future! You know how it all ends: at the throne of the Lamb in hymns of triumph and praise. You live from that even now. For 175 years the life of the coming age, where Jesus’ Love has triumphed over all else, has  been pouring out through St. Paul’s into Wartburg and the surrounding community. Our prayer today is that the Lord Jesus would continue to preserve His work in this place. That He would ever keep you faithful to Him, staunch and uncompromising in the teaching and spread of His Word. And that He may guard you with His holy angels unto the Day of His glorious appearing in triumph. On behalf of your sisters and brothers in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, I want to thank for the example of your patient faithfulness for the years past, and I exhort you to fear not whatever the coming years may bring. Though Heaven and earth will pass away, You know and live from Him whose words will never pass away: your Lord Jesus, to whom be praise, honor, and glory forever!

Oh, but we do not need to wait for heaven to sing to Him together with the Holy Mother of God, and all the saints! Right after we are blessed by the choir’s beautiful anthem, we’ll stand together and join in Mary’s Magnificat as our hymn of thanks for God’s great mercies!

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