Palm Sunday – Pr. Faugstad sermon
Text: St. Matthew 21:1-9
In Christ Jesus, who went to Jerusalem knowing that suffering, cross, and death were waiting for Him, but who went forward willingly in obedience to His Father and out of love for you, dear fellow redeemed:
If you had the ability to look into the future, and you could see that something tragic was going to happen to someone you love, you would almost certainly try to keep it from happening. This is a common theme in time travel movies. But the characters in these movies discover that even small changes in one time and place have unintended consequences and immense effects on what comes afterward. They find that when humans try to “play God,” the results are catastrophic.
Now imagine that you were part of the crowd on that Palm Sunday. Leading up to this day, everyone was talking about whether Jesus would come to Jerusalem for the Passover. You hoped to see Him. You had heard about the miracles He had done in Judea and Galilee over the past three years. You also heard how He recently raised Lazarus from the dead after he had been in the tomb four days. “Could this be the Messiah?” you wondered. “Who else could do what He does?”
If He was the Messiah, the Chosen of God, the Son of David, who better to take the throne of Jerusalem and lead God’s people Israel? Then word started to spread that Jesus was on His way. You left the city to see for yourself and followed the crowd to the Mount of Olives. You heard the singing and shouting before you saw Him, and then He came into view. There He was, your King, “humble, and mounted on a donkey.” The future of Israel looked bright!
But let’s say that in that moment of excitement and joy, God gave you a vision of the next six days. You saw the conflict and clashes that would take place between Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders. You saw them plotting by candlelight how they could have Jesus arrested and eliminated. You saw Judas making a deal to betray Him for thirty pieces of silver. You saw His arrest in the garden, His mistreatment and abuse from His captors, His flogging, the crown of thorns, and finally the crucifixion. You saw Him taken down from the cross after His death and placed in a tomb before a stone was rolled over the entrance.
If you saw all that in a vision on Palm Sunday, what would you do? Perhaps you would try to get the attention of Jesus’ disciples to let them know what terrible things were coming. Or you might try to reach Jesus Himself to warn Him. Maybe you would try somehow to stop the enemies of Jesus from harming Him. You could get word out to the Israelites gathered in Jerusalem to stay on the lookout and not let the authorities take Jesus. Whatever you could do, whatever it took, you would keep Jesus from being arrested and killed.
This is exactly what Peter and the other disciples tried to do. Remember how Jesus predicted His suffering and death in Jerusalem and His resurrection on the third day? Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you” (Mat. 16:22). Then on the night of Jesus’ betrayal, Peter declared, “If I must die with you, I will not deny you” (Mar. 14:31), and all the other disciples said the same. When a band of soldiers later met Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest Him, Peter drew his sword and got ready to fight to the death (Joh. 18:10).
But Jesus put a stop to all these attempts. He did not need someone to fight for Him. He was not looking for anyone to stop Him from doing what He came to do. The account of Christ’s passion recorded in the four Gospels does not read like a tragedy, as though Jesus got caught up in something that He didn’t see coming. He was no unfortunate fly getting stuck in a big spider web. Everything He did had purpose.
Look at today’s reading. As He made His way to Jerusalem, He gave two of His disciples specific instructions about a donkey and a colt in a nearby village. He told them where to find them and what to say if someone questioned them as they led the animals away. Everything happened just like He said, and it fulfilled a prophecy recorded by the prophet Zechariah more than 500 years earlier (Zec. 9:9).
We find these references throughout the Gospels, that Jesus did what He did “that the Scripture might be fulfilled.” Bible scholars point to hundreds of prophecies like this. The life of Jesus does not just occasionally connect to what the Old Testament says. His life perfectly matches all the prophecies of the coming Messiah. Jesus Himself called attention to this. He said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Mat. 5:17). And again, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” (Joh. 5:39).
Jesus had a plan. Everything was laid out for Him by the Father. It was no miscalculation that led Jesus to Jerusalem. It was no mistake that He was handed over to the Jews and then to the Roman officials. No one made Him go to the cross. Some time before this, Jesus said, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father” (Joh. 10:18). He perfectly did what His Father sent Him to do as today’s Epistle lesson says, “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phi. 2:8).
But what was the point of it all? Why go through that torment and agony? Why go to Jerusalem in order to get arrested and crucified? The answer is that it was for you. Do you find that hard to believe? Do you find it hard to believe that you would be part of God’s plan that led Jesus to the cross? You might feel like you are not important enough for that. You might think that God has bigger things to think about than you. He disagrees.
God the Father had you in mind when He promised to send a Savior. He had you in mind when He sent the angel Gabriel to the virgin Mary to announce that she would bear the Christ-Child. Jesus had you in mind when He perfectly kept the Law of God in your place, when He made His way to Jerusalem to suffer, and when He endured the wrath of God on the cross. What makes me so sure that it was all for you? Because He says so, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
You are part of the world. That means God loves you. That means He sent His Son to live for you, die for you, and rise again for you. He has shown that love for you in your lifetime by bringing you to the cleansing waters of Baptism and calling you by the Gospel to be His own. He speaks His gracious Word of absolution from my sinful mouth into your sinful ears. He gives the holy body and blood of Jesus for you to eat and drink. There is no doubt about it, what God sent His Son to do in Jerusalem was for you, for your salvation and mine.
That has a profound effect on how we think about our life. If you were part of God’s plan that sent His perfect Son to suffer and die, then He must have a plan for you today. You must not be an afterthought to Him. You must not have to make your own way in this world. He must have many blessings in store for you until He finally brings you into His kingdom.
This is a comforting thought and very liberating. If God has the plan for me, then I don’t have to try to control everything. If He has the plan for me, then I can accept hardships and health challenges and heartaches as trials that He will use to strengthen my faith in Him.
On our own, we might have an idea about how we want our life to go, but the path forward is unclear. We look back at some of the choices we made, thinking we had a good plan, and we see how far off we were. We didn’t have the faithfulness and the focus that we should have had, and it caused troubles that affect us still today. We learned the hard way that our heart is not a trustworthy compass. We can’t trust our own sense of direction to lead us into the future because our sense is misguided by sin.
The author of Hebrews tells us how to stay on course: “let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (12:1-2). At the right hand of the throne of God, Jesus dispenses His gifts of grace through the holy means He has given to His Church.
He does not leave you to fend for yourself in this life, to stumble blindly through the clouds and darkness, to search for answers or meaning that never appear. “Behold, your King is coming to you.” He comes through the preaching of His Word. He comes through the cleansing waters of Baptism. He comes in His Holy Supper, which is why we sing that Palm Sunday song in our Communion liturgy: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” He comes to bring you His forgiveness, His holiness, His strength for your daily struggles and needs.
We keep our eyes on Him, following Him through His triumphal entry at Jerusalem, the institution of His Holy Supper on Maundy Thursday, His suffering and death on Good Friday, His glorious resurrection on the third day, and His victorious ascension into heaven. Everything He accomplished is for you. Everything happened according to God’s will for your salvation, your life, your future—Everything According to His Plan.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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(picture from “The Procession in the Streets of Jerusalem” by James Tissot, 1836-1902)
The Baptism of Our Lord – Pr. Faugstad sermon
Text: St. Matthew 3:13-17
In Christ Jesus, who put His forgiveness and righteousness in the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, so that the Father is well pleased with us His children, dear fellow redeemed:
One of the most remarkable things about the life of Jesus up to the point of His Baptism is how little we know about it. We learn about His birth, His circumcision, and His presentation in the temple as a little baby. We hear about the visit of the wise men and how He had to flee with His family to Egypt when He was under two years old. We hear about His journey to Jerusalem and sitting among the teachers in the temple when He was twelve years old. And that’s it. We know nothing more about His teenage years or twenties beyond the summary recorded by the evangelist Luke: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (2:52).
That tells us that Jesus was respected by the people around Him. We know He never got in trouble, at least due to a wrong of His own, because He was without sin. He spent His days serving His mother Mary and guardian Joseph and helping His neighbors in need. It is shocking how mundane this seems. We are so used to Jesus active in teaching and miracles, that we have a hard time picturing Him in Nazareth as a regular citizen of the town. But there is a comfort here, too, that in all the time Jesus was living this mostly anonymous life, He was redeeming our lives by His perfect keeping of God’s Law.
And now the time had come for His true nature to be revealed. He traveled from Galilee to where John was baptizing at the Jordan River and stepped down into the water. When John saw Him, he said, “I need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?” That is a strange statement. At another place in the Gospels, John made it clear that he did not know who the Messiah was until His Baptism: “I myself did not know him,” said John, “but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel” (Joh. 1:31).
We know that Jesus and John had met before. John leaped in his mother Elizabeth’s womb when her relative Mary, pregnant with the Christ-Child, greeted her (Luk. 1:41). We assume that more visits between the two families followed through the years. This may be why John had a positive view of Jesus and considered Him to be superior to himself. But having great respect for Jesus was different than recognizing Him as the Messiah.
John saw Jesus in a completely different light after Jesus was baptized. When Jesus came out of the water, the heavens were opened, the Spirit of God descended in the form of a dove and came to rest on Him, and the voice of God the Father said, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” If the townspeople of Nazareth were present that day, they would have stood there wide-eyed. They would have said then what they said later: “Is not this Joseph’s son?” (Luk. 4:22). How could Jesus be the beloved Son of God?
But He was! All four evangelists record this event which shows its significance. Nowhere else in the Bible do we see the distinctiveness of the Persons of God depicted so clearly. There stood the Son, upon Him came the Holy Spirit, and from heaven spoke the Father. And yet, these three Persons were still one God. One God from eternity. One God in power and glory. One God over all—always Triune, one God in three Persons.
Once he saw the Holy Spirit come down from heaven upon Jesus, John knew this was the Christ, this was the Savior. He told everyone who would listen: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!… I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God” (Joh. 1:29,34).
The event of Jesus’ Baptism and John’s eyewitness testimony were recorded so you would know who Jesus is. He is more than a man; He is not just the Son of Mary. He is the Son of God. His Baptism was the beginning of His public work, His anointing by the Holy Spirit to His three-fold office as Prophet, High Priest, and King. The Father also left no question about Jesus’ Person. He said, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”—His holy, perfect, eternal Son.
So His Baptism reveals Jesus’ Person, but what about His Purpose? We are baptized, and we bring our children to be baptized, because of our sin. We go to the font for “the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit” (Ti. 3:5). We go to be cleansed “by the washing of water with the word” (Eph. 5:26). We go to be buried and raised with Christ, so we might “walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4).
But Jesus needed no regeneration and renewal. He needed no cleansing. He had no need of a new spiritual life because He was perfect. What prompted Him to go to the Jordan River to be baptized? Even John questioned why He should need to do this. And Jesus replied, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” He was baptized not to have sins of His own taken away but to impart His righteousness.
Many theologians have described Jesus’ Baptism as a great exchange. He stood there in the water at the beginning of His public work to have our sins poured over Him. And He went forward as a spotless Lamb to the cross, so that His righteousness would be poured over us. Our sins for His righteousness—that’s the great exchange. Everything Jesus did in obedience to His Father from His Incarnation to His Baptism to the Cross was “to fulfill all righteousness.”
He came to redeem every bit of your sinful life from the moment you were conceived in your mother’s womb and inherited original sin (Psa. 51:5), to the moment you take your last breath. Jesus left nothing undone. He fulfilled every tiny detail in God’s holy Law. He missed nothing. He said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Mat. 5:17-18).
He verified that He did everything He set out to do when He said from the cross, “It is finished” (Joh. 19:30). The fulfillment of God’s Law was complete, and so was the payment for all sin. By becoming a Man, the Son of God put Himself under the Law to keep it in every sinner’s place. And He had a body and soul that could suffer the wrath of God against sin on our behalf. This was God the Father’s plan, and Jesus willingly and perfectly carried it out. “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2Co. 5:21).
This righteousness was poured over you and credited to you at your Baptism. Some Christians who misunderstand Baptism regard it as little more than a ritual, a ceremony or tradition of the church that has no power in it. “It is just something external,” they say, “but what really matters is the decision you make in your heart for Christ.” But Jesus does not give us empty rituals. He gives us powerful Sacraments for dispensing His eternal gifts.
After His resurrection, He commanded His Church to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” by baptizing them and teaching them (Mat. 28:18-19). His apostles did this; they baptized sinners of all ages from all kinds of backgrounds. And the Church has continued to do this until the present day. Baptism is the primary means by which sinners are brought into the holy Christian Church and made members of the body of Christ.
Everything you needed to get to heaven was given to you at your Baptism. Galatians 3:27 says, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” If you have “put on Christ,” what do you lack? What more is there to add? If you have been buried and raised with Him, receiving the benefits of His death and resurrection (Rom. 6:4), what else could you need? All of this came to you as a gift from God.
But it is possible to lose this gift. This would happen if you no longer believed that the Jesus who stepped down into the Jordan River and was nailed to the cross on Calvary is the true Son of God. Or if you no longer believed that He did everything necessary to win your salvation, and therefore did not “fulfill all righteousness” for you.
If you do not believe in Him, then you are on your own. Then you have to answer for every bad thing you have done and for every righteous thing you have left undone. If your sins were not put on Jesus, then they are still on you. If His righteousness was not imparted to you, then you have no righteousness that counts before God.
It is vitally important to have a clear understanding about the gifts God gave you in Baptism, how He made you His own through those waters and changed the course of your life from destruction to deliverance. Jesus’ Nazareth neighbors had a hard time seeing Him as anything more than a man, but His Baptism revealed Him as the true Son of God on a mission to redeem the world. Your neighbors may look at you in the same way, as no different than anyone else.
But through Baptism, you became a true son of God and an heir of His eternal kingdom. You became a member of Jesus’ holy body, which means you are going where He your Head has gone. You are no longer stuck in your sin and destined for eternal death. You have been raised with Christ, you walk in newness of life even now, and you look forward to the eternal joys waiting for you in the Lord’s holy presence. For this we say…
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, forevermore. Amen.
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(picture from 1895 painting by José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior)
St. Joseph, Guardian of Jesus – Pr. Faugstad sermon
Text: St. Matthew 13:54-58
In Christ Jesus, whose coming was prophesied for thousands of years, but whose arrival still caught everyone by surprise, dear fellow redeemed:
Sometimes we wonder how our life would be different if we had chosen a different path. What if we had taken risks instead of playing it safe, or the other way around? What if we had followed the advice of this person instead of that person, turned right instead of left? Maybe we would have been more successful, more respected, more happy. Maybe we could have reached our full potential. Maybe we would feel today like we had really done something significant. Unsettling thoughts, and we’ve all had them at one point or another.
There is encouragement for us in the example of St. Joseph. Joseph was a descendant of the great King David, but it had been hundreds of years since a member of the family had occupied the throne. Joseph lived a ways north of the capital, up in the territory of Galilee in the town of Nazareth. We get a sense of the town when Philip told Nathanael about “Jesus of Nazareth,” and Nathanael asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (Joh. 1:46).
Today’s reading tells us that Joseph was a carpenter of some sort, working his trade in the community, working with his hands. He was neither wealthy nor well-known—not a person expected to make an impact on history. But God had other plans for him. He brought a faithful woman into his life—Mary—and they made plans to be married. They were “betrothed” to each other, which was a legally binding arrangement that came before the public marriage ceremony. Until the public ceremony, they stayed in separate homes and did not share a bed.
Then the shocker! Mary informed Joseph that she was pregnant. He obviously was not the father, and Mary’s story about a visit from an angel, and the Holy Spirit conceiving a holy Child in her womb, was difficult to accept. The evangelist Matthew writes that “Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly” (1:19). That tells you a lot about Joseph. Even in his heartbroken state, he did not want to make an example out of Mary or bring the Law down on her. He resolved to move on and go back to his work.
But before he took that step, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and verified Mary’s story. He referred to Joseph by his royal lineage, showing that God was laying out this path for Joseph. The angel said, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (1:20-21). Joseph listened. He set aside his reason. He ignored any doubts. He trusted the Word of God. He married Mary, and when her Son was born, he called His name “Jesus,” which means, “the LORD is salvation” (1:25).
We hear only a little more about Joseph. He had Jesus circumcised at eight days old and then brought Him to the temple at forty days old to present Him there as the Law of God required (Luk. 2:21-22). He rushed Jesus and Mary to safety in Egypt when King Herod wanted the Child dead (Mat. 2:13-15). He moved the family back to Nazareth after some time had passed (Mat. 2:19-23). And each year after that, he brought his family to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover (Luk. 2:41). All of these things show Joseph’s character. He was a man of faith committed both to the Word of God and to his family.
Jesus learned from him, which is surprising to think about. The evangelist Luke writes that as a youth, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature” (Luk. 2:52). In His state of humiliation, Jesus did not make full use of His divine power. He was able to learn and mature. And Joseph was right there to model a life of faithful adherence to the Scriptures and faithful attendance at the synagogue each week—a good model for Christian fathers today. He also taught Jesus how to build with His hands—a carpenter just like him (Mar. 6:3).
What we learn in today’s Gospel reading is that the people of Nazareth couldn’t get past the image of little Jesus working with quiet Joseph. They had heard about the miracles Jesus had done in the surrounding territory, and now they were listening to Him teach with authority in the synagogue. But instead of seeing Him in a different light and opening their ears to Him, they closed their minds. “Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works?” they wondered. They thought about His humble parents and their simple way of life. “What makes Jesus think He can teach us? Does He think He’s something special?”
They were wrong, of course. But we’ve been wrong like that too, judging people by our perception of them instead of by what they actually are. This is especially tempting in small communities like ours. We can judge people by the way we thought about them in elementary school or junior high. Or we can put them in certain categories and tell ourselves that they are all the same as before, and they aren’t worth our time.
But God tells us to love our neighbors, no matter how far back our history with them goes, or what we have perceived them to be. There is always a chance that we have gotten them wrong. There is always a chance that they have grown just as we’d like to think we have. Clearly the people of Nazareth got Jesus wrong. They had gotten His parents wrong too. Joseph was not just a carpenter; he was the legal guardian of the Christ-Child, whose coming had been prophesied for thousands of years. And Mary was not just a mother; she was the bearer of the Son of God, who came to destroy the work of the devil by His innocent suffering and death.
Neither Mary nor Joseph had chosen this for themselves. God chose them for these things. Who would ever feel qualified to raise the Christ-Child? They must have felt like failures, and not only when they lost track of the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem. They knew that the best they could do was not good enough. But they still carried out their calling from God. They trusted that since He had chosen this for them, He would bless their efforts—imperfect though they were.
This is your encouragement as you carry out your callings from God. Looking back on your life, you may feel that your life has been one long string of bad choices, failures, and missed opportunities. But that isn’t how God sees it at all. He sees you as His dear child, washed clean by the blood of Jesus and covered in His righteousness. He sees your light of faith shining in your home, your workplace, and your community. He sees you surrounded by neighbors who need your love and service—a life full of purpose.
It is the devil who wants to discourage you and make you discontent. He wants you to question if you married the right the person, if you can really give your children what they need, if your job is right for you, or if anyone actually cares about you. He wants you to think that maybe everything would get better if you just walked away, if you just started over. Then you could do what you were meant to do. Then you could reach your full potential.
But while giving way to selfishness may feel like a sort of freedom, it will only drive you more deeply into sin and its darkness. You are not here to serve yourself. You are here to serve the Lord by serving the people He has placed in your life. Jesus told His disciples, “I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit” (Joh. 15:16). It is the Lord who has planned the good that you would do. He is the one who has set the course for your life.
You haven’t missed out on some higher purpose, some greater thing you were supposed to do, by being where you are today. The Lord has big plans for you and important work for you to do right where you are. You are no failure to Him. God sent His Son to prove the value of your life by giving His perfect life for yours. He cleansed you of your sin and sanctified your life for His work at your Baptism. And He invites you continuously to feast on Him, the Bread of Life—to receive again and again His forgiveness and to be strengthened for your callings by His grace.
Joseph and Mary needed this too. Even while they were raising and providing for Jesus, He was living a perfect life on their behalf. He was keeping the holy commands of God for them and all people, and He would keep these commands all the way to His death on the cross to pay for sin—for His parents’ sins and for yours. His cross is where you take your selfish behavior, your discontentment about your station in life, your thoughts about leaving it all behind. You confess these sins to your merciful Lord, and He declares you forgiven, washed clean by His holy blood.
He chose you for the work you do for the neighbors around you, starting with the neighbors in your own home. Like Joseph, you will not carry out these callings perfectly. But your worth, your success, and your salvation do not depend on how perfect you are. They depend on how perfect your Savior is, and the work He perfectly completed to save you.
What He has done frees you to give with generosity and serve with gladness. Because the work the Lord has given you to do for others is His work. And if it comes from Him, then it is a gift, a gift for which He deserves all the glory.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, forevermore. Amen.
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(picture from “The Holy Family with a Little Bird” by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, c. 1650)