Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from the Gospel of John, the 14th chapter:
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”
Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
He is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia! And He really is risen, even though we cannot see Him in the flesh so to speak. Haven’t you thought about this? I know I have. Is God really real? Is God a real thing or is He something that we’ve all made up, some kind of collective delusion?
It’s so easy to doubt about the existence of God. It really is. First off, you have our sinful flesh, the world, and the devil all tempting us to disbelieve. They want you to deny even that God exists, all the while setting themselves us as a god for you. It’s really amazing; when God is not present, when His goodness and mercy are doubted, when we choose not to believe in God, then it creates a sort of vacuum, sucking in something else to fill our hearts and minds and faith.
If you won’t have faith in God, you will absolutely have faith in something else. And I don’t mean faith, like, I have faith that I’m going to get home, but faith in that this is the thing you look to as being the most important, most trustworthy thing. Maybe that’s science; we all know people who make science God and not look to the God who created science. Maybe it’s money. Maybe it’s your comfort. Maybe it’s your spouse or your children. Maybe it’s convenience or your own strength. You have a god, and it doesn’t always correspond to the one true God.
So, you’ll always have a god, but it’s easy to not believe in The God that we’re worshipping here today. We’re tempted, but then there’s this other thing, where we tend to not trust things we can’t see or sense. A train goes over the street, I’ll think something’s wrong if I don’t hear the whistle. My son lays still on the ground, I’ll think something is wrong if I don’t hear him giggle or cry. Our senses demand proof. Things don’t seem right, they don’t add up, if something is missing.
That makes it easy to doubt even in the existence of God, doesn’t it? I mean, you can’t see Him, at least not now. You can’t touch Him. You can’t smell Him. It really makes sense how people then, not only worship false gods, but have to make images of their gods to worship.
Now, this is different than, say, if you walked into my office. If and when you do, you will see a crucifix on every wall except one, and that’s only because the bookcase doesn’t give me very good wall space. A crucifix is a cross with a corpus, a body, on it. And, unsurprisingly, for Christians, it would demonstrate artistically the body of Christ. It’s not based on a picture or anything like, but it’s an artist’s rendering of the crucifixion so that our piety, how we worship and display that worship, will be focused towards Christ. The crucifix reminds us of the crucifixion and the great love that God has for us in sending His Son to die for our sins. That’s what it’s for.
So, when I say that we make idols, I really mean that. When Elijah was in the showdown with the prophets of Baal, which can be found in 1 Kings, he gets a little snarky. You remember the story? The get into a showdown about which god is real and Elijah taunts the prophets of Baal and locks them, saying, “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.”
Now, this is pretty funny. You see, the prophets had a statue of Baal that they said was Baal. They worshipped it. And more than that, they had to care for it. When it was time for Baal’s meditation time, they would have to take it to a peaceful place. When it was sleepy time, they would lay the statue down. When it came to anything else, they had to do. They made an image of something in creation, not even a true god, and worshipped it. They had to take care of a block of wood, and it would do nothing for them.
But our hearts want a god. And when we can’t see that god, we make an image of it to worship. And again, that’s not what we do in the Christian church. Our images are there to focus our piety, to remind you of the greatness of God.
But, you see? It’s hard to believe in God, isn’t it? It’s hard. We can’t see Him or touch Him and that hurts. I sometimes wish I were an apostle at Jesus’ time on earth. They saw Him. They walked with Him, ate with Him, slept under the same roof as Him. It would be so easy to believe in Him, if we saw that with our own eyes, wouldn’t it?
Of course not! Have you read the Scriptures? The apostles all fell away from Jesus at the crucifixion because they didn’t believe. And they kept sinning against Him and forsaking His teachings after His ascension. It wasn’t easy for them. In our sinful state, it’s never easy to believe. It’s never easy to love Him.
But, Jesus says that if you love Him you will keep His commandments. Oops. How are you doing with that? Probably about as well as I am, which is not well. But, Jesus doesn’t leave that there. He restores the apostles who fall away. He brings Peter back into the fold. He forgives the adulterous woman. He makes clean the lepers and the tax collectors together. Jesus, by His death and resurrection, restores the sinner to one who has obeyed the commandments, because He is the one who pays the punishment for your sin.
And to hold on to that gift, to have the benefit of the cross and resurrection come to you, specifically you, you must have faith. Jesus died for all people, yes? Yet, some people, even most people, sadly, will not be with Him forever. That’s because they reject faith. They choose to worship their own gods, because believing in Jesus, His Father, and the Holy Spirit is too much, too hard, too much like a fairytale.
But, faith can be and is offered to all. And this isn’t a blind faith. And it’s not a faith you create. It’s faith that is a gift from God, so that no one can boast. And if it is stewarded, taken care of, then that faith will ever deepen in its dependence on Christ. Your faith, the faith of Christ given to you, will never leave you forsaken. It will always deliver to you the grace of God.
And faith is never alone. It’s not something we can locate in our bodies, but, by the things that do effect our bodies, it is affected. You see, Jesus knows that you will struggle and doubt; He knows that you want to see Him, touch Him, sense Him. And just an emotional sense isn’t enough (and that’s not really what we should be looking for either, since God never promised that). Instead, our Gracious God gives to us His institutions: the hearing of His Word, the washing of His Baptism, the eating of His Supper. These things you can sense. You can hear. You can taste. You can feel. You can smell. You can touch. These things are Jesus. They are Jesus for you.
You want to see Jesus? Look to the Altar. You want to hear Jesus? Listen to His Word. You want to touch Jesus? Remember that His hand washed you clean. Jesus gives us what we want, He gives in to weak-willed creatures who need proof. He gives you His proof. He gives it to you so that, even after He ascended bodily into heaven, He would still be with you, personally, forever in His gifts. The world may see Him no longer until His return, but seeing Him never did it much good anyway.
We have it better than just seeing Jesus. We have Him on our foreheads. We have Him on our tongues. We have Him in our ears. We have Jesus for you, inside of you through gifts that are physical and are bound up to His Word.
This is what the Spirit taught us. The Holy Spirit continues to guide us into this truth, and helps direct our faith even through our doubts. He directs it to receive the promises of Jesus Christ. And through that, we then do obey the commandments. Through faith, we receive the salvation promised to us in Baptism, we receive the building up promised through His Word, we receive the strength to endure unto everlasting life through His Supper. And we are forgiven. Your sins are forgiven through these things, which are Jesus Himself for you, in you, with you. And you will believe in Jesus ever more strongly as you continue to faithfully receive these things.
Jesus is not a distant god, or a god of our making. Jesus is the God who made us in His image so that He would take on flesh and be made in ours. And He is the God who shifts all the rules, to create means of grace no one would expect, so that you would have the full benefit of obeying all of the commandments forever. He loves you so that you may love Him and believe in Him forever. And it will be forever,
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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