Concordia and Koinonia

The burden of yesterday is shaken off by glorifying the misty past, and tomorrow’s task is evaded by speaking rather of the coming millennium. Nothing makes a permanent impression and nothing imposes a lasting obligation. A sign of the deep forgetfulness of the present time is the film which is erased from the viewer’s memory as soon as it is over.

Text:  St. John 16:  When the Spirit of truth comes,he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

 In my junior year of high school, my father was transferred from Milwaukee,  Wisconsin to Washington, D.C.  And all of a sudden a whole bunch of relatives wanted to come for a visit!  During the summer, I became my family’s tour guide to our nation’s capitol.  I like being a tour guide. Our Lord uses an interesting word to describe the Holy Spirit’s  work, translated as “guide”  literally “to lead along the road”, that is, kind of like a tour guide.  I have been tour guide here for friends and family and I want people in Lexington to see VMI, W and L, Lee Chapel, the VMI museum etc., that is the high lights.  Years ago when I went on a college trip to Eastern Europe including the then Soviet Union, in Russia we had a tour guide for the entire time from the Intourist state bureau and only what that dictatorship wanted us to see.  First, it is helpful in another country to have someone who know the language in order to get along.  In Russia, the tour guide wanted us to see as well the highlights of the Soviet Empire, which meant in Moscow the sights of the czars.  In doing so, a tour guide will teach you about the land in which they are so proud and pleased to live in.  A tour guide thinks he is telling the whole truth about her native land. Therefore, Russia or here, no tour guide is going to show you the low lights of a town or city or nation. Oh, here is where all the poor people live.  This is the abortion clinic.  Over there is where prostitution is rampant.  Here in this house there was a gruesome murder.  The old Adam does not like the whole truth, in fact, he cannot take the truth but the Lord, like a good teacher, persists in His grace for us all.     

 Back to the Lord, the Holy Spirit.  The Lord said that the Spirit of truth tour-guides you into all the truth. The truth is both principle and person that is respectively, both Law and Gospel, the Word of God. The principle is the 10 Commandments, the guide of right and wrong which shows us when we have strayed off the right path and what the right path is. 

  The person is the Word made flesh Jesus Christ who fulfilled the Law by which we know we were lost, afraid, and dead in our sin, at our wit’s end, a dead end.  He became lost for our sake, crucified, dead and buried and risen to find us, as He found the disciples. He cried out in dereliction, My God, my God why have you forsaken me?   Sin is death and no tour guide in this world will ever show you this sight and teach you this.  The Holy Spirit does as He points the crucifixion of the Author of Life. Jesus said I am the Way, the Road, the path. His crucifixion is where and when the Holy Spirit will always guide us where in perfect freedom Jesus Christ went to die, to lay down His life, to take it up again.  The lowest of the low lights in all history is where the depths of God’s love was poured out for us all.  

 Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father.  IN the Gospel, Jesus is teaching in the night in which He was betrayed.  He is going; He gently tells the disciples who do not know His way.  Also us.  They will not see Him, and then they will.  The disciples did not yet realize that outside the Upper Room, a storm unlike any other in the history of world was brewing.  The Lord knows this.  The Lord knows His disciples will grieve and then they will see Him again.  He also tells them they will be given the Lord, the Holy Spirit, the tour guide into all the truth, the low lights of sin, death and the power of the devil, and the highlights of grace, mercy and peace in Jesus Christ. 

 The tour guide, the Holy Spirit, unlike a human tour guide, will show you all the sights, high and low. The Lord has been doing such from the get go:  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ²The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.  Creation is definitely a highlight!  The Holy Spirit spoke by the prophets from Moses to Malachi preaching the Word of God to a wayward Israel in its depths, so that we too may be guided by the Lord.  He filled Saul and David to rule according to the Word of God, but when David committed adultery and was ruled by  his sin, the Holy Spirit showed him his sin through Nathan the prophet so David repented.  His Law shows that the Lord goes not forget sin and through Jesus Christ, His Gospel forgives sinners.  The Lord, the Holy Spirit, has a guidebook, the Bible. St. Paul wrote to Timothy regarding this guidebook:

 “…continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it ¹⁵and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. ¹⁶ All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, ¹⁷that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3)

 The Lord guided you Timothy by His Word growing up with the goal always of your salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. He taught you out of His guide Book from the time you were born.  His guide Book is replete with the journeys and travels of the narratives of the frailties and fears, faith and hope, repentance and forgiveness of people like you and me.  The Holy Spirit warns:  “Bridge out!”  “Detour”, “Dead-end”, “Wrong Way”.  He exhorts, This way, the one Way.   Through it all and now in the fullness of Jesus Christ, the Lord the Holy Spirit declares all that Jesus taught and did, and shows us the things to come, the new heavens and the new earth. A tour guide is particularly important in a foreign country: he can speak the language.  The Holy Spirit is well versed in the language of the Kingdom of God that we hear in “…our own tongues the mighty works of God” (Acts 2).  Through His Word, the Holy Spirit who inspired this Book will equip us for freedom in Jesus Christ in faith, not to go my way, which is death, but His way, which is eternal life.  Along His way we meet people groping in the darkness, they too need the guidance of His Word, His forgiveness. For the way is always marked by the Cross-, the signpost of freed travelers. How can you tell who the tour guide is in a city in the midst of his fellow travelers?  Easy:  the tour guide is holding up an umbrella, a sign, a flag for the group to see and follow.  The  Holy Spirit lifts high the Cross of Christ for all to see and so follow our Lord!  St. Paul wrote to the Galatians that he portrayed the Crucifixion of Christ as if he, in effect  put in on a billboard to see, so we know the Way (Galatians 3:1) We cannot find our way without a guide and we have one, and the Holy Spirit is all truth, a compass, lodestar, a non-failing GPS.   His Word in His words is “trustworthy and true” and His Word is solid and certain, as solid and certain as the nails in His hands which finally could not hold Him:  Jesus Christ.   

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

Week ago Saturday I went to the Scots/Irish Festival at Rockbridge high school.  There was a shepherd demonstrating the use of sheep dogs in herding his sheep.  The dogs instantaneously obeyed his verbal commands.  If he said lie down, all the dogs laid down. They knew his voice, his word. Then he said that when he disciplines his dogs he never, ever uses his hand.  He used his cap and showed us by a slight hit on his dog’s head.  The shepherd explained that the reason he never uses his hand because he wants his sheep dogs to associate his hand with care and guidance, not punishment.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. ²⁸ I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.

 The Lord’s hand is powerful to save. In His hand is His Law.  The alien work of His Law and Judgment, more powerful than a cap, shows us our sin and His anger against sin. Sin is death.  No one in this world would ever make that correct equation.   He drives and draws us to His proper work, to bring us to Himself, the Good Shepherd and to fear no evil in His grace, mercy and peace. He draws us to Himself as the Lord also drives away those who would come in to terrorize the flock.  The whole purpose of the shepherd’s use of sheepdogs is to bring the sheep to the shepherd, no less the Lord.  And to protect the flock from the thief and the fierce wolves.

 The shepherd uses a foreign object to discipline his sheepdogs.  The Lord comes not to destroy His sheep, but to call them and He warns us and disciplines us by His Law to show us when and where we go astray.  If the shepherd in his demonstration at the festival did not have a staff, nor his sheepdogs, what would happen to the sheep?  “All we like sheep have gone astray, everyone to his own way”.  His Law and His judgment like the shepherd’s cap is alien to His nature.  His true nature is He gives to His flock “eternal life”. He wants us to know that by His all-powerful hand, He guides and cares for us.  He leads ever us to the evergreen pastures of His Word and washes His flock, lamb and sheep, in the still waters of His baptism.  “All we like sheep have gone astray, everyone to his own way…but the verse continues, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.  The Good Shepherd’s hand is imprinted with the mark of the nails.  This shepherd laid down His life for the sheep, for you. King David was first a shepherd as a lad. I do not think even King David when a shepherd would have laid down his life for his bleating, needy sheep.  The Good Shepherd has.  Like a sheep on a shepherd’s shoulder, you do not have to lug your sins around or pretend they do not exist or minimize their infection.  They are on the Good shepherd’s shoulders as He was nailed to the Cross. Jesus is quite clear, He is not any shepherd.  He and His Father are one, one God. He alone has carried the full brunt of the just Law of God and it’s punishment for our sake.

 He has authority to lay down His life, He has the authority to take it up again. He has the authority to say on the Cross:  It is finished, the lamb of God who is the Good Shepherd.  Lamb to take away the sin of the world, the Good shepherd to guide His Church, true man and God. .  AS the apostle Paul encouraged the Ephesian elders, that is the pastors, care for the flock, His church that the Lord purchased with His own blood. Jesus knew that thieves would come into the flock.   They come to kill and destroy and hired hands flee.  Paul says the fierce wolves will teach “twisted things”.  Thieves and wolves wreak havoc and terror on a flock. We saw a whole city hide indoors as terror stalked and skulked in the streets.  We would also be afraid and rightly so.  But also us to be afraid of those who with soothing words are actually words of terror: it’s all right what you are doing, feel good about yourselves when the commandments are being broken.  Sheep can get lost through sheer negligence and wandering away from the Lord’s vigilance.  The Good Shepherd’s vigilance is so there will not be the necessity of vengeance.  Fierce wolves who teach twisted things, perverted things about the goodness of greed, the self at all cost, the denial of marriage and family, your body is a sexual playground,  all the while bearing the Name of Christ.  As Christ also taught, these are false prophets, wolves in sheep’s clothing.  Our protection?  “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” His protection is His table. At the previous pastors’ Bible study we discussed again the way the Lord could manifest Himself in a locked room. Pastor Carr said the answer is simple.  One of his seminary profs said the Lord could so appear, manifest Himself because He was already there.  The Lord promised, where two or three are gathered together in My Name, I am there.  Now, we walk by faith, not by sight.  The Good Shepherd is present in His Word as He promised.  He protects by the table of His Word. Martin Luther commented on Psalm 23:

When one has the Word and in faith clings to it firmly, these enemies, who otherwise are invincible, must all yield and let themselves be taken captive. It is, however, a wonderful victory and power, also a very proud and haughty boast on the part of the  believers, that they may compel and conquer all these horrible and, as it were, almighty enemies — not by raging, biting, resisting, striking back, avenging, seeking counsel and help here and there, but by eating, drinking, rejoicing, sitting, being happy, and resting. All of this, as we have said, is accomplished through the Word. For in Scripture “eating and drinking” means believing and clinging firmly to the Word; and from this proceed peace, joy, comfort, strength, and the like.

 From the youngest to the oldest, all are to eat and drink His Word, some it will be milk, others solid food, but all need to hear,eat and drink, God’s word, the pasture of His eternal life. When Jesus was threatened with being stoned to death for His Word that He and the Father are one.  (Note: it was not for His good deeds, but the good creed:  Christians were and are not hunted down and killed for good deeds, but the good creed), At the end of chapter 10 the Lord went beyond the Jordan where John baptized. There the Lord taught and many came to Him and believed.  Where He is there is His Church, His Flock, His Temple.  Walking wet in our Baptism is what this world needs in these times of terror, His Word. We do  not need more raging, biting, resisting, striking back, avenging, seeking counsel and help here and there, in the courts of public opinion.   In the courts of the Lord’s house, not in the portico of the Temple, but in the Temple Himself, the Word Made Flesh, the Lamb and the Shepherd and His Scripture and Sacraments, has He prepared His Table.  One day, maybe above the Table of the Lord, from the grandest cathedral to  a mobile one, He was always there will manifest Himself for the last time in glory on the Day of Judgment, the Lamb upon His Throne. Come, Lord Jesus, come.