Sermon for 8/18/24: Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 15b)

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Sober Singing
Ephesians 5:15-21

Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

 

St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “Do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit…” It seems in most places that there are two or three churches for every bar or club. Even so, I suspect that the taverns have more people on a Saturday evening than there are in the churches on Sunday morning. People generally prefer to consume distilled spirits over receiving the Holy Spirit. Looking for comfort, strength, courage, or whatever else in the bottom of a bottle may be a fruitless search, but it’s still a more popular alternative because it doesn’t require you to do or say or believe anything. This is why people prefer to get drunk on Saturday evening over attending the Divine Service on Sunday morning. As many of our Lord’s disciples said as they were walking away, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”

Of course, it doesn’t help when churches are led by preachers whose doctrine changes like the wind. As soon as the social justice warriors change the standards of human conduct, many pastors are quick to fall in line. It used to be shameful for a woman to preach; today it is thought to be shameful to refuse women preachers. Living together outside of marriage used to be hidden, shamefully talked about in whispers if spoken of at all; today it’s considered by many to be hateful for a pastor to speak against cohabitation, much less attempt to discipline a couple for it. Whatever the fashionable and favorite sin of the moment, the world acts as if it is hateful and evil to agree with God when He condemns that sin.

Those who abandon divine truth to be popular with the world make their appeal to the love of Jesus. “Jesus is love,” they say, “and so anything done in the name of love must be good.” But the world does not know what love really is; “love” has become just another word for excusing sin. When the Church bows to the world, it abandons truth. When there is no Law to condemn us in our sin, the world sees no need for a message of the forgiveness. Jesus Himself has becomes irrelevant in the eyes of the world, no matter how often His name is invoked.

But where the church has kept the treasure her Lord has given her; where God’s law is preached without compromise, condemning us for our sins; where Christ’s suffering and death for us is proclaimed to real sinners guilty of real sins; where the sacraments of Christ are administered as our Lord instituted them; it is there that God blesses us with the riches of heaven. He joins us and speaks to us where we live; He draws us into communion with Himself. Heaven and earth, God and sinners, are reconciled, and we find our little bit of heaven right here on earth.

When Christians gather together as the church, we make melody in our hearts to the Lord. We sing to God. We worship Him. We give thanks to Him. But we also sing to one another, “speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” We sing together our faith, our confession. We say to each other what we believe. Confessing the faith marks us as Christians. The apostle reminds us that we share the faith with one another by means of music. We confess our faith in our God in the same way. The thanksgiving we offer to God is offered in the name of the Lord Jesus because it is in His name—the name placed on us in the waters of Holy Baptism—that we are children of God. 

That brings us back to Paul’s command not to be drunk. He presents a clear contrast between getting drunk, where we lose control, and being filled with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is our Teacher. He is our Comforter, our Counselor, and our Advocate. He is not the Spirit of unbridled emotional exuberance; He is the Spirit of truth. He teaches us the truth. He tells us that we are to love God with our heart, soul, and mind. We don’t learn the will of God for us by losing our minds or losing control; we learn the will of God for us through being transformed by God. Spiritual enlightenment is a wonderful work of God for us. It takes place within the minds of His people as the Holy Spirit opens the Word to us. We don’t choose between getting high on alcohol and getting high on religion; we choose between living in conformity with the evil in our world and living as Christians; we choose, as we heard last week, between imitating God by walking in His ways and imitating the world and its prince, the devil.

We go to church because we cannot live the Christian life without the Christian faith. We need the Gospel. Our faith depends on it. We need to confess our sins to God, for our sins have captured our affections and we cannot set ourselves free. We need to hear the Gospel; we need to hear that we are forgiven by the blood of Jesus and we are set free. Just as surely as Christ’s body and blood are given us to eat and to drink, God forgives us all our sins for the sake of Christ. Our sinful hearts will deny this. The world will scoff at it. The devil will rail against it and slander those who preach it and confess it. But it is our greatest joy; it is what opens our lips to sing God’s praise. And when we confess this truth together, when we sing it together, God binds us together and builds us up as Christ’s church, with a joy no alcohol or narcotic can match. In the name of the Father and of the Son (†) and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

The peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus always. Amen.