WEBVTT 00:00.650 --> 00:04.990 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 00:07.330 --> 00:10.580 I like First Corinthians. 00:10.234 --> 00:13.280 You got chapter 15, Resurrection of the Body. 00:13.650 --> 00:19.498 You've got the second half of chapter one, chapter two, Paul's 00:19.514 --> 00:22.270 Epistemology of the Cross. 00:24.290 --> 00:28.310 But the first first nine verses where's the dean? 00:32.250 --> 00:36.246 But as usual, it's not just 00:36.348 --> 00:38.380 I hope this email finds you well. 00:40.990 --> 00:42.854 There were a couple of things that made me stumble. 00:42.902 --> 00:46.650 First of all, I don't have all that many spiritual gifts. 00:47.950 --> 00:52.702 Reminded me of a student who gave up studying for the ministry because 00:52.756 --> 00:57.120 he flunked a spiritual gifts inventory 40 years ago. 00:58.690 --> 01:02.738 And then I remembered that the Holy Spirit had given me Himself as a 01:02.744 --> 01:03.940 new birthday present. 01:05.430 --> 01:13.740 And that, as Thomas Chiselholm knew in the hymn we have just sung for man 01:13.112 --> 01:16.400 had to leave the Methodist ministry because he got ill. 01:18.100 --> 01:19.350 God is faithful. 01:20.570 --> 01:25.814 Paul has a wonderful passage as he addresses Timothy we will live with 01:25.852 --> 01:28.506 Him if we are willing to die with Him. 01:28.608 --> 01:32.140 We will reign with Him if we just hang in there. 01:33.700 --> 01:36.380 But if we disown Him, he will disown us. 01:37.790 --> 01:40.910 And then comes the test of faithfulness. 01:41.650 --> 01:49.340 If we become faithless, he will remain faithful, because he cannot 01:49.162 --> 01:51.700 deny Himself. 01:52.500 --> 01:55.730 He can't disown his own genetic makeup. 01:56.630 --> 01:58.366 He is who he is, he told Moses 01:58.398 --> 02:00.450 and throughout the Old Testament 02:00.870 --> 02:03.540 Faithful is his name. 02:04.470 --> 02:08.289 Examples of God's faithfulness in the Old Testament a bound. 02:08.449 --> 02:12.946 Israel was always turning to indifference, if not rejection, testing 02:12.978 --> 02:14.700 God's patience. 02:16.330 --> 02:23.140 And Eden is repeated every time God comes after them, saying, Israel, 02:23.620 --> 02:24.140 where are you? 02:25.700 --> 02:29.210 And giving them the grace of receiving his rebuke. 02:30.610 --> 02:36.300 And Israel's, history prefigures my own, but the Holy Spirit remains. 02:36.770 --> 02:40.480 He is the giver and the gift, the gift that keeps on giving. 02:41.730 --> 02:46.714 He is the Holy One who comes with forgiveness in his bag, freely 02:46.762 --> 02:49.230 distributing until you think it would hurt. 02:50.530 --> 02:55.420 But the hurt of our forgiveness was already felt by Jesus 02:55.660 --> 02:57.350 on the cross. 02:59.500 --> 02:59.970 And so what 03:00.170 --> 03:04.862 Chiselholm just told us great as his faithfulness, never ending his 03:04.916 --> 03:11.853 compassion, never stopping his provision for us. Words of comfort for 03:11.972 --> 03:18.974 those like us who participate participate in an individualistic and 03:19.120 --> 03:24.350 materialistic society in ways that we hardly notice. 03:27.130 --> 03:31.750 Faithfulness is the problem Paul was working on with the Corinthians 03:32.970 --> 03:35.670 because they weren't always completely faithful. 03:39.100 --> 03:45.560 But our faithfulness he describes exquisitely in Chapter 13. 03:46.940 --> 03:50.650 He has restored us to God's image, to a certain way of life. 03:51.120 --> 03:54.750 And we will be patient and kind. 03:55.840 --> 03:57.304 We'll give up on envy. 03:57.352 --> 03:58.760 We won't be boastful. 03:58.920 --> 04:01.640 We won't be arrogant or rude. 04:01.112 --> 04:05.904 We won't hang on to our own stuff, and we won't defend our own 04:05.942 --> 04:08.290 interests to the harm of other people. 04:09.220 --> 04:14.459 We will not be irritable or resentful and driven by fear that produces 04:14.540 --> 04:20.156 anger and vengeance on often on the innocent just because they're 04:20.188 --> 04:21.730 easier to pick on. 04:23.800 --> 04:27.683 We will not be rejoicing in wrongdoing, even if it's for that which we 04:27.722 --> 04:30.650 think is a just cause. 04:31.580 --> 04:37.800 We will repudiate fake news and rejoice in the truth. 04:38.140 --> 04:41.850 We will bear all things, believe all things, hope in every way. 04:43.200 --> 04:44.168 Hard ways. 04:44.334 --> 04:49.000 Hard words for North Americans these days to swallow. 04:50.220 --> 04:53.228 But they are words that we, as citizens of the United States need to 04:53.234 --> 04:57.232 take very seriously on this day when we remember the life of Dr. 04:57.286 --> 05:01.984 Martin Luther King. And are reminded through his death of the plague of 05:02.220 --> 05:09.760 violence that descends us so called civilized us Americans in spite of 05:09.980 --> 05:10.580 our enlightened culture. 05:11.320 --> 05:15.140 I mean, how would you like to move to a country where kids are scared 05:15.480 --> 05:18.100 to go to school because they might get shot? 05:20.700 --> 05:26.884 Martin Luther King was a saint and a sinner, just as his namesake 05:27.120 --> 05:28.330 admitted to being. 05:28.860 --> 05:33.895 But today we take his life as an admonition and encouragement to risk 05:33.928 --> 05:38.876 life itself to carry out what Paul saw as faithfulness in the midst of 05:38.898 --> 05:40.110 a hostile world. 05:41.680 --> 05:45.400 Members of Christian churches in our land just don't know what to do 05:45.419 --> 05:50.760 now that after 500 years, at least for us Lutherans, we're not in 05:50.980 --> 05:51.340 charge anymore. 05:51.919 --> 05:54.124 Well, you could say we never were in the United States, 05:54.162 --> 05:59.140 The Puritans ran the place, but they ran it in a fairly Lutheran way 05:59.289 --> 05:59.919 to a large 06:00.900 --> 06:00.750 extent. 06:01.810 --> 06:06.460 And we have never had to learn the lessons of how to be a Christian in 06:06.680 --> 06:12.670 a hostile society, as have many fellow Christians in the 20th century 06:14.130 --> 06:18.474 in the Soviet Union, in National Socialist Germany and their occupied 06:18.522 --> 06:19.310 lands. 06:20.450 --> 06:26.454 They had to learn how to live out First Corinthians 13 in the midst of 06:26.492 --> 06:28.400 enemies all around. 06:30.810 --> 06:34.902 We dare not rely on political forces that often hypocritically use 06:34.956 --> 06:38.774 what seems good to Christians to further their own agenda of 06:38.812 --> 06:43.930 dominating exploitation, callous disregard for the for the people that 06:44.000 --> 06:50.600 interested the prophets, the poor, the downtrodden in whose behalf the 06:50.480 --> 06:51.578 prophets always spoke. 06:51.754 --> 06:56.478 We must learn that we rely alone on the foolish and weak word of the 06:56.484 --> 06:59.870 cross, and not monger fear and anger to arouse passions. 07:02.130 --> 07:05.330 Martin Luther King's dream proved to be very fragile. 07:06.390 --> 07:15.600 Racism and exploitation and a failure to defend the poor, are rampant 07:15.380 --> 07:19.846 and our land again. And our default as sinners is self defense, and 07:19.868 --> 07:22.440 anger and love go better in God than us. 07:22.810 --> 07:27.140 He is wrathful when we are unfaithful, but he is faithful to draw us 07:27.520 --> 07:29.320 again into his way of life. 07:30.490 --> 07:33.626 We need to remember well, I call it my favorite Bible story, though 07:33.648 --> 07:34.810 it's not in the Bible. 07:35.310 --> 07:40.894 In 1971, Pauline and I went to the German Democratic Republic for 07:40.932 --> 07:44.794 actually, the last pastoral conference of the old Saxon Free Church 07:44.842 --> 07:46.670 Missouri's mission to Germany. 07:47.900 --> 07:52.510 The west pastors were going into our sister church, the Zelk, and the 07:52.580 --> 07:57.470 east pastors were going to be left behind the Iron Curtain. 07:58.500 --> 07:59.438 I was a fairly young U.S. 07:59.604 --> 08:03.826 American, and was quite impressed first of all by the stupid signs all 08:03.848 --> 08:14.600 over that said, the heart, the soul, the spirit of the people is the 08:14.280 --> 08:16.498 party, and so forth. 08:16.594 --> 08:19.770 It was all silly, but you saw it all over. 08:19.840 --> 08:23.706 And then we heard the stories of harassment from the last year, from 08:23.728 --> 08:31.158 the east pastors. How demonic the system tried to infiltrate the 08:31.183 --> 08:33.182 church and lure the people away. 08:33.236 --> 08:38.813 And I said to one brother, to understand this story, you have to know 08:38.852 --> 08:43.326 that at that time, Walter Ulbricht had just become not only head of 08:43.428 --> 08:49.294 the Socialist Unity, the Communist Party, but he had also become head 08:49.332 --> 08:50.174 of state. 08:50.372 --> 08:52.640 All the power was in his hand. 08:53.730 --> 08:59.586 And so I said to one brother how's the church, humanly 08:59.617 --> 08:59.940 speaking, 09:00.000 --> 09:01.694 going to survive in a situation like this? 09:01.732 --> 09:07.374 And he ignored the humanly speaking and simply said, Walter Ulbricht is 09:07.412 --> 09:09.390 not the Lord of the Church. 09:11.250 --> 09:14.394 He didn't really prove to be Lord of much at all, as the German 09:14.442 --> 09:18.560 Democratic Republic he had founded vanished soon. 09:19.250 --> 09:21.870 Not soon enough, but soon thereafter. 09:22.690 --> 09:29.862 And so we live in the midst of a nation which is being torn apart by 09:29.916 --> 09:34.934 selfishness and greed and exploitation and failure to understand what 09:34.972 --> 09:39.610 it's like to be on the other side of the divide. 09:40.110 --> 09:43.702 Paul knew that there were differences between Jews and Greeks. 09:43.766 --> 09:45.386 He'd eaten with both. 09:45.568 --> 09:51.134 He knew that there was a difference between being slave and free, knew 09:51.172 --> 09:55.150 that there was a difference between man and woman. 09:56.370 --> 10:01.806 But he knew also that in Christ, God's love returns us to Eden, where 10:01.828 --> 10:03.810 it was not good to be alone. 10:04.390 --> 10:07.220 But all humanity is embraced in the community. 10:07.750 --> 10:12.402 The first article of the Formula of Concord reminds us that all 10:12.456 --> 10:18.146 sinners, whether they have been turned to Christ or not, are worthy 10:18.178 --> 10:26.180 human beings, real people, not simply, not simply created in the image 10:26.340 --> 10:26.950 of Satan. 10:28.650 --> 10:32.380 And so the Holy Spirit is faithful to us in the midst of a land 10:32.750 --> 10:37.958 that is not the land that I was born in, I'll tell you that, but it's 10:37.974 --> 10:42.526 the land I'm called to serve in now. As one who exhibits the love of 10:42.548 --> 10:48.686 Jesus Christ as He comes to us from the cross in the midst of 10:48.708 --> 10:49.630 suffering. 10:51.410 --> 10:55.860 And so I regard even the first nine verses of Paul's letter to the 10:55.108 --> 11:00.654 Corinthians as a precious gift. For Paul's, laying out again before us 11:00.692 --> 11:05.238 the life that centers in faith and trust in the faithfulness of, of a 11:05.244 --> 11:10.358 God who just loves us to death and loves us to the resurrection of our 11:10.364 --> 11:11.350 righteousness. 11:12.890 --> 11:13.894 That's the way it is. 11:13.932 --> 11:15.640 That's the way we are. 11:16.250 --> 11:22.486 As we begin this second week of Epiphany in our Lord's year 2023. May 11:22.508 --> 11:26.726 the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and 11:26.748 --> 11:28.290 minds in Christ Jesus.