Fr. Anthony Installed as Headmaster of Bethlehem Lutheran School, Ossian, Indiana
One of our Gottesdienst bloggers, the Reverend Anthony C. Dodgers, was installed this past Sunday afternoon, December the 4th, as Associate Pastor and Headmaster of Bethlehem Lutheran Church and School in Ossian, Indiana. It was a grand and joyful occasion in a thriving and faithful congregation, with many people in attendance, including many brother pastors on hand to witness and participate in the installation. God bless and keep and prosper Fr. Anthony in his new office and station, to the praise and glory of His Holy Name!
A highlight of the Installation Service was a marvelous sermon by the Reverend Samuel Wirgau, Senior Pastor of Bethlehem. It was an outstanding preaching and catechesis of the Word (Ephesians 6:1-4; John 21:15-17), not only appropriate to the specific occasion but applicable to a godly understanding of creation, the Church, and Christian vocation. With Pastor Wirgau’s kind permission, I am very pleased to share his sermon with you here. Soli Deo Gloria!
In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Your heavenly Father has ordered His creation in love for the preservation of His creatures in both body and soul. In the diversity of calls and the particularities of one’s station in life God is at work for the good of the world, even when you do not see it, even when we may see quite the opposite. No matter the seeming insignificance that one may feel in their place in life, no matter the short-comings and weaknesses that beset us, we are His creatures and it is our duty to thank, praise, serve, and obey Him.
To serve Him is to serve your neighbor; to obey Him is to do so according to His commandments. He has not set you in the order of His creation and left you in ignorance of your callings. Nor has He left it up to you to figure out what is true, good, or beautiful. He does give you freedom, but He also directs you in His Word to His good and gracious will, so that you would be strengthened and kept in the truth faith until you die.
He is a kind and merciful father to the entirety of His creation, and what is true and overarching for all is particularly true for those whom He has called by the Gospel to the one true faith in His Holy Christian Church. He is our Father and we call upon Him as such. We are His children, sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, having been baptized into Christ and having put on Christ.
You are set into the order of this creation and to your many callings in life having the chief calling as baptized children of God, so that all you do, speak, and think, how you teach, how you learn, how you ruminate and meditate on all things, is as a Christian. You are called to live in your baptism, in repentance and faith in Christ’s Gospel, to confess your sins and receive His absolution, and to so rise from that absolution to live in the newness of life.
That is what it means to belong to your heavenly Father and to your earthly fathers. That is why God gives us Christian families and sets us in order in the household: “Children, boy your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’ (this is the first commandment with a promise), ‘that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.’”
This is not mere moralism, training in obedience and virtue, for even the pagans can live and teach that. To live in such a relationship, children obeying parents and parents bringing up children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, is for the good of creation and for the good of Christ’s church, to direct children to repentance and the forgiveness of sins.
God gives families and gives authority to the family. He entrusts fathers and mothers to care for and nurture His children. They are God’s agents both in the secular kingdom of the world and also the spiritual kingdom. Parents raise their children to be good citizens, to pursue knowledge, to grow in wisdom. They also provide them with the most needful thing, for man does not live by bread alone. Therefore they bring their children to be baptized in Christ’s Church, to hear the Word of God and to receive His gifts in the Divine Service to be strengthened in their faith.
They do not abdicate this God-given authority and responsibility either to the Church or the State. Parents are not dispensable, but are essential, foundational. God has given them children with all that that entails and that must not be taken away from them.
Our Lutheran teachers assist parents in the raising of their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. God has ordered all things to work together for the good of His creation. Teachers assist parents full-time in the teaching of all subjects.
So too do the varied subjects of education work together in a marvelous order in God’s creation. The ABCs and 123s, the reading, writing, and arithmetic, the arts and sciences, although distinct from Christian doctrine, are not opposed to it.
As children grow in wisdom and knowledge, learn to read, write, think, and communicate, they learn more about God and His creation. They learn to better know God and to understand His creation. They learn to better know and understand His Word which comes to us by way of grammar and logic. Likewise the truth of God’s Word permeates all subjects as He teaches us what it means to be man and to live in His creation.
Furthermore the Lutheran School provides an environment in which the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins is not only taught but lived out, as students are directed back to the font, pulpit, and altar, to the gifts Christ freely gives from His called ministers, and to love to one another. They are directed to the Church, for the school cannot live without the Church.
That is the good order God gives. But as in all things in this fallen creation it does not always go the way that it should. Our sins and the sins of others hinder and hamper, disrupt and disorder the good order of God. Our pride leads to conflict among parents and teacher and pastors. Our sloth leads to abdication of our duties and responsibilities. Our misplaced priorities lead to the atrophy of faith and life. Our rebellion sets us against each other and against God.
Repent, children, parents, teachers and pastors. Return to the Lord your God, to His Word and His will. Fall upon His mercy, for He is merciful. He maintains the orders of this world despite our sin and shortcomings, our failures and frustrations. And precisely because He is merciful He continues to give the full and free forgiveness of sins by the mouth of His pastors in His Church, spoken to broken and sinful families and to a broken and sinful world. This is what children and parents need above all else.
You, Pastor Dodgers, have been called to this even as you now take up your charge at Bethlehem Lutheran Church and School.
Much changes now for you: new places, new people, new duties. A learning curve is before you. You will experience frustration, disappointments. The people you serve may likewise. That is the case with any new calling. Do not live by self-justification nor live in despair, but live in repentance and faith and find in Christ your identity and life.
In many ways nothing changes for you. You have been called and ordained as a servant of the Word, to preach, absolve, and administer the Sacraments. As you have done before you do here. Your shortcomings and weaknesses follow you. We are jars of clay after all.
But you enter here as a restored Peter, freed by the absolution to feed the lambs and tend the sheep of Christ. As you give so must you receive. Be restored by the absolution. Be a student of God’s Word and of His world. Be fed and tended and go forth, and as you have received, give. Do this not because you are perfect or even sufficient for the task ahead, but do this because you have been restored, absolved, and given to this task.
You have been placed into this order in God’s creation and in this place. It is God Himself who works and orders all things in His Church, in the school, in His families, and in His world.
“Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God” (2 Cor. 3:4-5). In Jesus’ Name. Amen.