This is the sermon I preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Wednesday, March 10, 2010. Midweek services from Ash Wednesday through Maundy Thursday will explore the theme, “Living as Christians.”

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Readings

Exodus 19:16–25
Psalm 100
Ephesians 2:19–22
Matthew 28:16–20

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Prayer

You call us to return to you, Lord God, and to leave behind all things that keep us from giving ourselves fully to serve you. Speak to us through your Word, so that we may turn to face you and to give you glory; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Message

This evening we mark the midpoint
of our weekly Lenten gatherings
to reflect on our theme: Living as Christians.
Along the way on our journey,
we have learned that evil twists us away from God,
but that He blesses us by His grace
to love Him and others by practicing justice.
We receive that grace and love through Holy Baptism,
our dying to sin and emerging washed and reborn.

This is a journey we do not take alone.
We travel through life,
we face the depths of our sin,
and we feel the drenching of God’s grace
as members of a community of believers
making its way together.

We call this community the Church.
By another journey with some twists and turns,
the word “Church” comes to us from a Greek phrase kuriakon doma
meaning the Lord’s house.
Sometimes we’ll run across the term “ecclesiology,”
meaning the study of the Church.
This word comes from the Greek ekklesia,
meaning “the called out ones.”

But no matter what particular words we use,
the truth is that this community
is one that God our Father creates.
He gathers us around the Word, His Son;
He empowers us by their Holy Spirit
to worship Him and witness to others.

The reading from Exodus
tells us a chapter in the history of God
gathering the people of Israel.
He calls them together in a holy place
and He dwells in their midst.
We don’t gather at God’s holy mountain,
but each week we do come here to this place,
hearing and heeding God’s call to assemble around His Word
read in Scripture, proclaimed in Sermon, and offered in Song.

And we see and we feel God in our midst,
washing and claiming new Christians
through the water and Word of Holy Baptism.
Then we receive Jesus Christ into our very selves
as we eat His body and drink His blood
in the meal of Holy Communion.

We kneel before our Lord in our hearts
when we confess our sins
and hear His pronouncement of forgiveness.
We bow our heads before our Lord
as He blesses us with healing
in the touch and oil and cross of anointing.

In all these “many and various ways,”
we find our lives blessed and changed
by our encounter with the living God
here and now in the gathering of this community.

Sometimes we get a little off-the-track
and begin to confuse
the Church as the community of God’s people
with this place, the building in which we gather.

The Augsburg Confession,
one of the basic texts that Lutherans trust
as a true statement of and witness to the Christian faith,
presents a clear and insightful definition of the Church:

It is the assembly of all believers
among whom the gospel is purely preached
and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel. (AC VII.1)

A few insights flowing from this definition can help guide us:
One person cannot be the Church alone:
It is the assembly of all believers.
There is only one Church:
It is the assembly of all believers.
The Church has only one focus:
Worship centers on preaching and the sacraments
that empower witness and service.

These insights help us when we begin to go astray.
Sometimes we might be tempted to say,
“I can worship God on my own.
I don’t need the Church.
He’s real to me in the beauty of nature.”

There are bits of truth embedded in these feelings.
We can pray to God when we are alone,
and in fact God desires us to come to Him daily in prayer.
And when we look at the works of His hands,
we are right to be moved to offer Him our praises.

But for us to live faithfully,
we need to be a part of the community
that God Himself has called out from the world at large to gather around Him.
Even when we annoy one another—
and it gets hard to believe that this broken and flawed gathering
could possibly be God’s tool for blessing us—
it still is the truth that the Church is God’s household of faith.

That’s why St. Paul tell us in his letter
to the Church at Ephesus:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens,
but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God,
built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.
In him the whole structure is joined together
and grows into a holy temple in the Lord;
in whom you also are built together spiritually
into a dwelling place for God. (Ephesians 2:19–22, NRSV)

We are these citizens with the saints and members of God’s household.
And when we are tempted to despair and to stray,
we can be encouraged and corrected
by remembering that each of us and God’s whole Church
are projects under construction:
“grow[ing] into a holy temple in the Lord,”
who has promised us,
“I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20, NRSV) Amen.