Sermon - Quasimodo Geniti 2022 - John 20:19-31

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio, 1602

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

This Tuesday is the 175th anniversary of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod. 175 years isn’t much when compared to the 505 years since the Lutheran Reformation, or the 2000 years since Jesus began His public ministry, or the thousands of years before that when God founded His church with Adam and Eve, but 175 years is still worth remarking on today. The LCMS had humble roots here in the US, not unlike the church on that first Easter morning. Jesus began with just 12 apostles, although on Easter morning Judas had already hanged himself and Thomas was mysteriously missing, so there were just 10 at the first Easter. The apostles were hiding inside for fear of the Jews, afterall if their master was crucified, then certainly they were next. But from those few men the church spread across the face of the earth!

Likewise, the LCMS was founded April 26, 1847, by just 14 small congregations scattered across Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Buffalo, and St. Louis (and those were the days of traveling by horseback). Things were not so great in the world at the time. In the mid 1840’s there was a bad potato blight, and millions of Europeans starved to death. In 1848 there were a string of revolutions across Europe. In the US in 1849 there was a terrible cholera outbreak. About a decade later the US fought the Civil War.

Religiously the landscape wasn’t as pretty as we often think. The world was awash in agnosticism and atheism from European philosophers which had infected many European churches, which is where many of our European ancestors were immigrating from. Recall that Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto in the 1840’s. Many Lutherans had been suffering under the Prussian Union, where the Lutherans were forced to embrace Reformed theology. The Enlightenment pushed rationalism upon churches, doing away with the supernatural and thus focusing almost exclusively on moral living.

There were already Lutheran church bodies in the US in the 1840’s, lots of them actually. The problem was that they were quite liberal! Those Lutheran bodies were willingly building Lutheran-Reformed Union churches (there’s actually one still standing just north of here up by Jackson, MN). So the fathers of the LCMS, in the midst of a very stark landscape, both politically and theologically, drew up a constitution and formed the LCMS. 

Why? They had five reasons: 1. The example of the apostles. 2. The preservation and furthering of the unity of pure confession and to provide common defense against separatism and sectarianism. 3. The establishment of unity in church government and its execution, and the largest possible similarity in ceremonies 4. The will of the Lord that the diversities of gifts be used for the common good. 5. To make possible the promotion of common church projects. (Seminary, agenda, hymnal, book of concord, schoolbooks, Bible distribution, mission projects within and outside the Church.) 

Ultimately, those five reasons for starting the LCMS boil down to the fact that Christ assembles His church together so that He may breathe His Word upon them and fill them with faith. The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod was formed so that pure Word of God would be preserved among the faithful and hopefully spread to others.

Our Lutheran forefathers knew, just like the apostles, that they couldn’t be alone and that they had to assemble together, even though they were few and hated by many. They knew that it wasn’t enough for them to sit at home and pray and read their Bible, rather they needed one another. This is a powerful reminder for us gathered together today! We need each other. Jesus knows that we need each other, which is why He established a physical church with human pastors.

In our reading today Jesus established that office of the holy ministry: Jesus said ““As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” Jesus didn’t send books and magazines into the world to preach and forgive sins, He sent men. Jesus didn’t send video and radio broadcasts, He sent men. Just as the Father didn’t proclaim everything directly by a disembodied voice from heaven, but the Father sent the Son in flesh and blood, so does Jesus perform His work through the pastors He sends. 

Jesus knows that we’re slow of heart to believe, so Jesus operates physically. When Thomas doubted that the Christ had risen, Jesus returned and took Thomas’ finger and stuck it in the hole in His hand “Put your finger here” and took Thomas’ hand and stuck it in the hole in His side “put out your hand, and place it in my side.” This is why Jesus teaches us to practice private confession and absolution with our pastor; He doesn’t just want us to think we’re forgiven in our minds. Rather He wants us to hear that we’re forgiven from His messenger’s lips, He wants us to feel the pastor’s hand on our head, He wants us to know for certain that each and every sin we’ve committed is truly and definitely forgiven through His death on the cross. He wants us to have faith.

The Bible was written so that we may have faith! “These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.” “Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” What does it mean to overcome the world? It means to have eternal life, and this eternal life is in His Son.

That is why Jesus assembled Christians together and founded His church, that is why Christians have always sought out Christian congregations, that is why the LCMS was formed, that is why we are gathered here today: to hear the voice of Jesus, to have the Spirit breathed out upon us, to receive the sacraments, to be filled with Christ’s gifts of life and salvation! Those gifts of Jesus give His church vigor. The eleven apostles went from cowering in a room to all but one being martyred for the faith after spreading the Gospel to the world. The LCMS started with just 14 parishes, to today having nearly 6000 parishes and the largest protestant parochial school system in the nation. God blesses His Word and His Word bears fruit.

That voice of Jesus has the power to awaken the dead to life. I don’t just mean on the last day, though that too, but even now God’s voice puts meat on our bones and breath in our lungs. Ezekiel saw a valley full of dry bones, but when God commanded Him to preach a great miracle appeared! “As I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them… I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.”

We’re facing a stark landscape in our own day, not too terribly different from what our forefathers faced. There’s war in Europe. A global pandemic. The church is in serious decline here in the West, the worst it’s seen in modern history. The woke culture and sexual revolution has been fermenting for generations now. There’s no quick fixes. It looks like we’re in a valley filled with dry bones!

But remember what we have! We have the same hope that Christians have always been filled with, we have the same Word of God spoken to the apostles, we have the same faith which believes in Jesus, we have the same Savior who shall breathe His Spirit upon this valley of dry bones. I don’t know what the next 175 years hold, nor even what the next month holds, but I do know that the same Word of God will guide us through these tumultuous days. If there is any hope for renewal and for the dry bones among us to be reanimated, our hope is in Jesus and remaining steadfast to His pure word. In Him there is life, so let us find ourselves in Him. God the Lord has spoken; He will surely do it.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!