Sermon for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of My Installation as Your Pastor
WHY WE SPEAK THE CREEDS IN WORSHIP
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus
Christ! Amen. The Christians of the ancient city had been thrown into a bit of
a tizzy. Some false teachers had been stirring up the Thessalonian Christians,
shaking their minds and alarming them by telling them that Christ had already
returned and that these Thessalonians had missed Him. In response to this
terrible disturbance among them, Paul wrote today’s Epistle to the
Thessalonians and commanded them in the most earnest terms, “Let no one deceive
you in any way.”
What shall we say we are celebrating today? The quick answer is that we
are celebrating my tenth anniversary as your pastor. But maybe that answer is
too narrow. Maybe we should say that we are celebrating the tenth anniversary
of your tolerance; the tenth anniversary of your gracious examination and
acceptance of my preaching and teaching; or the tenth anniversary of “the unity
of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3) that God has mercifully
preserved between you and me. Whatever we call this
day-that-celebrates-a-decade, Paul’s message in today’s Epistle is as earnest
and as important for you as it was for his Thessalonians of old. Dear
Christians of Grace Lutheran Church, “Let no one deceive you in any way.”
I. OUR APOSTLES’ CREED COULD HAVE HELPED THE THESSALONIANS
One of the earliest creeds in the ancient church was the simple
expression, “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:11). It took some time for
this one-sentence creed, “Jesus is Christ Lord,” to develop into the fuller
form that we have now have in the Apostles’ Creed, but just imagine how much
difficulty could have been avoided if these early Thessalonian Christians were
already confessing the full form of Apostles’ Creed in their worship every
Sunday. False teachings about Christ’s return had been shaking these Christians
around, tossing them back and forth like a ship on a stormy sea. (If you have
ever felt a panic attack or a case of extreme nervousness about your situation,
you probably can relate to what these poor folks were experiencing.)
· The Apostles’ Creed could have provided anchor and ballast to the
wave-tossed Thessalonians, especially with its confident expression concerning
the future, “I believe… Jesus Christ… will come to judge both the living and
the dead.”
· The Apostles’ Creed could have served as a tape measure or a plumb
line, by which these Thessalonians could have evaluated the preaching that they
had heard. Where these damnable false teachers were saying, “Christ has already
returned and you were left behind,” the Thessalonians could have pointed to the
Creed and said, “What you are telling us does not measure up and align with the
Christian faith! We believe that Christ will come to judge both the living and
the dead. Since we are here among the living, we further believe that we
ourselves gathered in to be part of the judgment. Gee, we certainly do not
remember anything like that happening recently.”
· Anchored and ballasted by the Apostles’ Creed, having used this same
creed as their tape measure or plumb line, these Thessalonians could have then
turned the Creed into the whip or the club they used to drive those
faith-destroying false teachers out of their midst—just as Christ our Lord
drove the moneychangers from the temple (John 2:12).
II. THE APOSTLES’ CREED IS VITALLY IMPORTANT FOR YOUR
EVERYDAY LIFE!
Anchor and ballast; tape measure and plumb line; if it comes to it,
whip and club: we Christians must use the Apostles’ Creed today in all the same
ways. We speak the creeds to one another every Sunday—either the Apostles’
Creed or the Nicene Creed or the Athanasian Creed—because these creeds are
essential for your survival and my survival in this life. To use the words of
today’s Epistle, these creeds will help you “let no one deceive you in any way.”
1. The Creed is anchor and ballast for your life.
An anchor helps a boat hold its position, especially as the wind and
current beat against the boat. Ballast is the weight you place in the bottom of
a canoe—ballast is also the bilge water you pump into the lower hold of a large
ship—to keep the craft from flipping over.
The Apostles’ Creed (with its sister creeds) is your anchor and ballast
for your everyday life. Just think of some of the things you have
experienced—or perhaps are right now experiencing.
· Last Monday was All Saints’ Day. All Saints’ Day is a day of rejoicing
because Christians who mourn the death of their fellow Christians need not sink
into despair. We have the anchor and ballast of the Apostles’ Creed, which
holds us afloat with its divine promise, “I believe… in the resurrection of the
body and the life everlasting.”
· Christians who feel plagued by their regrets and upended by their
recurring guilt have everyday ballast in the Apostles’ Creed, whereby we each
insist by faith in Jesus, “I believe… in the forgiveness of sins.”
· Christians who suffer injustice; Christians who are mistreated;
Christians who experience panic attacks; Christians who cannot seem to regain
their health; Christians who feel weak and storm-washed and wind-blown: All of
these Christians have God’s gift of instant stability in the promise of the
Apostles’ Creed. Speaking God’s powerful and life-giving Word to you, the Creed
promises and assures you, even in your darkest hours, that all wrongs will be
made right again, that nothing happens here on earth beyond where your Christ
is, that not even death spells the end of things for you, for “[Jesus] ascended
into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence
He will come to judge the living and the dead.”
2. The Creed is the tape measure and plumb line for the teachings you
hear, most especially in the Church.
You use a tape measure to make sure that your project is the right size. You
use a plumb line to be sure everything is properly aligned and in good form.
The Apostles’ Creed is your tape measure and plumb line for the teachings you
hear every day, but most especially in the Church.
· When you go off to the university and get it drummed into your head
that evolution and not creation is the only intelligent explanation for the
origin of the universe, measure what you hear by means the foolishness of the
Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and
earth.”
· When you turn on what they call the Christian radio station, like I did
the other day, and when you some Yahoo announcing that there is going to be a
rapture and God is going to suck up all the Christians and leave behind all the
unbelievers and it is going to happen on May 21, 2011 (that is a Saturday, by
the way, so don’t plan on sleeping late), pull out the plumb line of the
Apostles’ Creed: “He will come to judge the living and the dead.” When you hold
these straight and true words of the Apostles Creed against such nonsense
claims as you hear on the radio, you will quickly see how whacked and
out-of-alignment such preachers are. And you will feel bad for ALL the poor
Thessalonians, both those in Paul’s day and those who believe the false
preachers of today.
· And when you come to worship on Sunday, the situation gets extremely
serious, if not potentially deadly. You might think that, after ten years of
listening and evaluating my preaching, you can now relax. You might think that
you have come to know your preacher and that you no longer have to be so
careful about the content of his preaching. Listen to what Paul is telling you
today! “Let no one deceive you in any way”—not even someone whose teaching and
preaching have become comfortable and familiar to you. Every Sunday use the
Creed to measure the preaching of the Church—that is one of the reasons why you
have it in your worship.
3. The Creed must become a whip and a club against your preacher, if it
comes to that.
Maybe you do not like the sound of using the Apostles’ Creed—or its two
sisters, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed—as a whip or a club to be
used against false teaching. Be warned about being too nice when it comes to
the matters of the Christian faith! Nice does not bring you forgiveness of sins
and eternal life. God’s Word brings you forgiveness of sins and eternal life. I
forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit. I forgive you, not because I like you and want to be nice to you,
but because God has sent me here to speak His Word to you.
If preaching does not stay closely tied to God’s written Word,
preaching ceases to be preaching and it becomes nonsense and useless blather.
Even worse than that, if preaching does not stay closely tied to God’s written
Word, then the words you hear in the pulpit stop bringing you eternal life and
they actually begin promoting your condemnation. Preaching requires
faithfulness to God’s Word. This means that preaching requires your pastor’s
continual repentance and your unending vigilance. I am not above leading you
astray. I am corrupt from the ground up and the only good thing in me is the
good that Jesus has delivered and sustains through His Word.
· I need the same forgiveness that I proclaim to you.
· I need the same, ongoing change of life that you likewise need.
· I need for my week what you need for yours—the same Word, the same
preoccupation with Baptism, the same Body and Blood of Holy Communion, the same
repentance and faith that God creates by means of these gifts.
The moment my repentance ends—the moment I depart from the Creeds—pull out the
club and the whip. Require my repentance, dear saints, or require my departure
from this pulpit. “Let no one deceive you in any way.”
III. THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF YOU AND ME
AND THE APOSTLES’ CREED
What shall we say we are celebrating today? It is too narrow to say
that we are celebrating my tenth anniversary as your pastor. It is also too
narrow to say that today is the tenth anniversary of your tolerance or your
acceptance of my preaching and teaching. We should say that today is the tenth
anniversary
· of you and me mutually holding the faith of the Apostle’s Creed here in
this little building on the corner of Burke and Dekalb Streets in Versailles,
Missouri;
· of you and me standing here together in the forgiveness of sins that
you hear preached and that you yourselves confess in the Creed;
· of our face-to-face participation in the “holy Christian Church, the
communion of saints”; and
· of our divinely-given certainty that, no matter whether our God keeps
me here in this pulpit another ten days or another ten years, we shall by the
grace of God enjoy together “the resurrection of the body and the life
everlasting. Amen.”
___________________________________________________________________
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