This Sunday, September 17, is the
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Verse of the Stewardship Season:
This week’s sermon is: A Debt Paid
This week's readings are :
Message: The
Church – Holy By the Blood of Jesus
When you drive around any city, town, or village in the U.S.
you will likely see a church – more likely churches.
What impression do those churches give people?
Old and
mysterious?
Modern
and active?
Disconnected
and out of touch?
Old
fashioned and irrelevant?
That depends on the person’s experience of and relationship
to the Church.
Vibrant
faith
Nostalgia
Hurt
One word that I suspect is unlikely to come to mind these
days is – Holy
Creedal
churches confess – one Holy, Christian, and Apostlic church.
God
calls his people holy/saints – and the gathering of his people he calls the
church.
How is that possible?
Look at
it –
Scandals
Schisms
– even within denominations
Skullduggery
Sinners
But Christ came for sinners – to save us, forgive us and
make us … holy.
Luther talked about the church being shabby in the eyes of
the world.
400 (or so) years later, a Swedish Lutheran bishop named Bo
Giertz wrote that often, “These words [holy church] signify what she [the
church] has been, what she ought to be, and what she could
be. The more reality seems to contradict them, the more necessary it is that we
recognize their original meaning letting them impact us with the full power of
their content.”[1]
So, what is the original meaning of a holy church?
Giertz again, “The holiness of the Church rests on this
fact: You were bought at a price. You are God’s own, consecrated for God.
The Church’s holiness is God’s holiness, not the people’s. It is given
from heaven. It cannot be gained on earth.”[2]
People seem to think that the Church and it’s local
manifestations/congregations operates on a contract; if we do the right things
we will be holy in God’s eyes and the eyes of the world. The truth is we live
in a covenant of grace in which God looks upon us as holy for Jesus’ sake, even
if in the world’s eyes (or our own!) all that can be seen is a gathering of sinners.
The holiness of the Church is not sourced from its people,
but it’s source is Jesus – crucified, raised, and coming again. It’s source is
the Holy Spirit – calling, gathering, and enlightening Christians in all times
and places with the Word and Sacraments. It’s source is our Heavenly Father –
the One who is holy in and of himself and calls us holy. In the end, that is
our confidence.
[2] Giertz, p. 51
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