The sermon for December 12 was based on Matthew 11:2-10.

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

The only thing worse than a preacher who never tells you that you are saved by grace through faith for Christ's sake alone is a preacher who never tells you anything else. That central doctrine of the Christian Church, justification, is absolutely necessary and utterly indispensable. Without it everything falls to pieces but it isn't, in and of itself, everything.

Almost everyone here is a very careful, very confessional Lutheran who is deeply devoted to the truth of justification by grace through faith for Christ's sake alone. And almost everyone here want to experience his redemption with the kind of intensity and immediacy that old Ebenezer Scrooge felt at the end of Dickens' wonderful story. We can't help but want that kind of visceral assurance that we are right with the world. Even John the Baptist craved greater assurance, a deeper experience of what he thought he knew for sure. How could he not? He was a sinful man, like the rest of us. He knew he should be joyful and he knew he was not.

Today is a day for joyfulness. The mildly heightened sobriety of Advent is lifted a bit today. The color of the candle in the Advent wreath is rose rather than the starkly penitential violet. On this occasion for joyfulness we, like everyone else, want to know how to be joyful, where to discover joy and how to sustain our experience of it. We're not talking about silly emotional ecstasies or enthusiastic transports of delight nor are we talking about trying to find perfect joy in a world that under God's curse. We're simply talking about the most joy, the greatest peace that we poor sinners can hope to experience this side of heaven.

And like everyone else, we've got it all wrong. We all think that in order to find joy we need to add things to our lives. The worldling tries to find joy in life by adding luxury and power and potential. The Christian is tempted to find joy in his life by adding good works and the daily exercise of virtue. But joy isn't something you add to life. If you don't find your life to be very joyful, you don't need to add anything you need rather to take some things away. This is the hardest things for voracious consumers like ourselves to swallow.

Here is the simple yet shocking premise upon which we all falter so frequently. Life is good. All by itself, with nothing added to it, life is good. When God created life during the first six days of the universe, He took time out to say over and over again that it was good. You only have to read the very first page of the Bible to learn one of the most powerful and difficult to accept truths. Life is good. We have an easier time believing that God created the world in six day though, even with all our modern assumptions, than we do believing that life is good.

And it isn't just life that's good. God is good. Little children all over the world say it when they open their lunches, God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food. Amen. Little children know it. But we grown ups find it terribly hard to accept. Adam knew it. Eve know it. They knew first hand that God was good and that life was good too. That understanding is what defined their paradise. They walked with God and en-joy-ed His gifts. Then came the lies and the falsehood and with them came the misery and the sorrow and the grief.

Your life is good. But your experience of it is polluted by doubt and denial. These two sins in their various applications are responsible for a tremendous amount of the misery we suffer and inflict on one another. We don't need to add joy to our lives as if they were some kind of neutral soup base that needed to be spiced up. What we need to do is recognize the falsehood in our lives and get rid of it so that we can begin to more perfectly experience our lives the way they were created to be lived. We need to get rid of our doubt and our denial.

First of all our doubt. We doubt the goodness of God because we fail to appreciate the goodness of life. We experience one hardship after another, we inflict one heartache after another and wonder how a truly good God could let these things happen. We want to be brave and daring and full of generosity but we're always held back by the suspicion that God isn't really looking out for us after all. That if we cut loose and start living a life of expansive compassion and Christian charity, that we'll wind up paying for it ourselves. So we hold back, suppressing our joy.

Worse than doubt, though, is denial. We would rather believe that life itself is bad than that we're bad. Life stinks, not me! Most of us will try to deny our sins to the very end, like some kind of pathetic criminal, caught red handed and still pleading that he didn't do it. This kind of denial squelches most of our joy. When we're confronted with a sin and try to deny that it is a sin, we wind up looking for ways to justify bad behavior. The man who is always angry tries to justify it and in so doing teaches his children to be angry and, worse still, gives them no reason to question their anger. The woman who is always complaining and giving her opinion about how things should be and running down the people around her tries to justify herself, tries to deny that she is sinning, and in so doing repels the goodwill for which she longs while at the same time becoming the object of her neighbor's unchristian dislike. Any sin you can name works in the same way. The only antidote to this kill joy contagion is repentance. The only truly Christian response to sin is recognition and repentance.

Once we stop fighting the Law that condemns us we find peace and joy. The man who is free to admit to one and all that he does have a bad temper and that it is a grief and shame to him is a man who will increasingly find himself resisting the urge to burst out. The woman who admits that she is something of a scold is more likely to catch herself on the threshold of one of her self-destructive tirades and thus more likely to grow into a peaceful and contented lady. Once we quit pretending that we aren't the problem a whole lot of our problems go away. And there's a reason for this. It isn't will power or psychology or anything like that. It is the goodness of God.

It is the work of the Law to condemn us, to show us that we repel so much of what is good about life. Once the Law does it's work, the Gospel swoops in and soothes us with the assurance that God is so good that He died to forgive the very sins we've come to recognize in ourselves. This one two punch of Law and Gospel makes a huge difference and they reinforce one another. The Law makes us desperate for forgiveness and the Gospel gives us the confidence in God's goodness to continue a life of ongoing repentance.

So we've come full circle, we're back now to that all important doctrine, justification by grace through faith for Christ's sake alone. We can't get anywhere without it but once we've got it we can go anywhere.

From here the Sacraments take on a much greater significance. Communion stops being something we add to our lives and becomes something we use to get rid of the pollution in our lives. Holy Baptism, likewise, becomes a much greater comfort because it washes away sin and gives us faith in our good and gracious God. Confession and Absolution become absolutely precious to the person who has had even a glimpse of the truly Christian life. This is the most comforting and joyful of all the Means of Grace as far as I'm concerned. To say right out loud that I am a sinner and of a specific kind. To admit that I am weak in such and such a way and then to hear that I am forgiven and that God is with me in the face of temptation and promises to give me ultimate victory at the end of all things. Even Charles Dickens would have a hard time capturing in writing that kind of comfort, that kind of joy. Amen.

The Peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Last Updated: 7/15/2008