Matthew 7:15-23; Romans
8:12-17; Jeremiah 23:16-29
In the Name of the Father and of the
+ Son and of the Holy Spirit.
During the last several weeks following
Easter we heard quite of bit of Jesus’ teaching from St. John in chapters
fourteen through seventeen, which are commonly known as Jesus’ “Farewell
Discourse.” These last few weeks with you I intend to have a sort of farewell
discourse with you as well drawn from Jesus’ words for you from each week’s
Gospel. Today we will consider Jesus’ words, “A healthy tree cannot bear bad
fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit,” and “Not everyone who says to
me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the
will of My Father who is in heaven.”
These may seem harsh words, and indeed
they are if you are a non-fruit bearing tree, but they need not cause you to be
fearful if you love Jesus and His Word and bear His fruits in your life and
deeds. After all, Jesus is speaking to His disciples whom He loves, for whom He
is about to go to the cross, and He wants them to be prepared for life in this
world after He leaves them and returns to His Father by remembering what He has
told them and by remaining in Him through faith and bearing His fruits in love.
A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit anymore than a diseased tree can bear good
fruit. Therefore, we must consider, what fruit are we bearing, and what fruit
are you bearing in your lives?
We have been together for fifteen years
now, some of you the entire time, most of you for less, and some of you have
only been with us for a few months. I love you all in Jesus Christ. I have
always thought of you as His children, purchased in His blood, over whom I have
been given the task of caring for, feeding, protecting, equipping, and sending
for service in His kingdom to the glory of His Name. I haven’t always done that
perfectly. Indeed, I’ve made plenty of mistakes over these years, and often I
have let my own sinful flesh and desires rule me so that I did not do the will
of God the Father, but my will, which was ultimately the will of the devil. I
am extremely sorry for that, and I repent of that, just as you repent of your
sins and flee for comfort in the merciful forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ.
You see, we are not so different you and
I, save my ordination into the Office of the Holy Ministry. We are all sinners,
and we are all forgiven in the Words and Wounds of Jesus Christ. And yet, I
have the holy and terrifying orders of standing in the stead and in the place
of Jesus Christ to bring to you and to serve you with His gifts for which He
gave His own precious and holy life unto death. I have attempted with all my
heart and with all my strength and with all my knowledge and with all my faith
to do that faithfully, for your sake, to the glory of God in Jesus Christ.
Oftentimes when you considered me rigid, or cold, or out of touch,
old-fashioned, or whatever else, I suspect that it was because I was so very
concerned to bring you nothing but the Word of God and His Sacraments as
faithfully and purely as I was able.
That is what a pastor is called to do –
to be faithful to you, God’s people, by being faithful to God. I know that the
world desires constant variety and relevance, that human reason seeks
practicality and usefulness, and that the human heart demands passion and
emotion in order to feel alive, however, none of these things can be permitted
to overrule or replace the Word of God and His Blessed Sacraments or to invert
the relationship of service He has established with us that we may be forgiven
and restored to communion with Him and bear His fruits of love in service to
our neighbor in the world.
All that being said, I believe that my
ministry among you has indeed been fruitful, and I believe that you and I
together have been fruitful, even as each of you as individuals have been
fruitful in your vocations. Over the years, the Divine Service has been prayed
in such a way that it is self-evident to visitors that God is not simply an
idea which we honor with our lips, or an impersonal clock-maker god who is not
involved in our lives but only wants us to be happy and be good to each other,
or even a spiritual guide like any other god, goddess, or guru, but that He is
really and truly present in both a spiritual and physical way in His Word,
Baptism, Absolution, and Supper. People know this, and you know this, because
of the reverence that is shown for His Name, His Word, and for His body and
blood. They are real, and they are present, and they are holy, and so we speak
softly and humbly, we bow and kneel, we bless ourselves with the sign of His
cross, the sign that was placed upon us when we were baptized into His death
and resurrection and claimed and named with His Name as His very own sons and
daughters, we chant, we pray, we eat His body and we drink His blood, we teach
this to our children who have come to desire Him more and more at even younger
ages, and we take His gifts with us into our lives in the world as we leave
this place and take our vocations as priests presenting our bodies as living
sacrifices in selfless love and service of our neighbors to the glory of God.
Some may look only at the numbers, both in terms of attendance and finance, and
conclude that we have not been fruitful, that we have declined, or something
else; but this is not true, and more than that, we have grown together in faith
and knowledge of Jesus Christ and we are stronger now than we were fifteen
years ago because we trust less in ourselves and the ways of men and more in
God and obedience to His Word and commands.
However, we bear good fruit, not because
we are good, but because our tree is good – and our tree is Jesus
Christ and His cross. If we trust in Jesus and do His will, our fruit cannot
possibly be bad. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks of it. It doesn’t
matter what the numbers say. It doesn’t matter what the checking book balance
is. What matters is that we remain faithful and bear His fruit, that is, do the
work He has given us to do. There have always been, and there will always be,
those who call God’s good things bad or evil because they don’t conform to what
man desires or his reason demands. For example, men called Jesus’ death on the
cross evil, and people today call the symbol of His death, the crucifix, evil.
And yet, Jesus’ death is the greatest good God ever did! Jesus’ death on the
cross was God’s gift of love for the world. Moreover, Jesus’ death on the cross
was not His defeat, but His victory! Truly, if Christ had not died and been
raised, then, as St. Paul says, we would still be in our sins and the most of
all people to be pitied. No, we are not theologians of glory who call good evil
and evil good, but we are theologians of the cross who call a thing what it is.
When we consider the cross of Jesus Christ, we remember the love of God poured
out for us and Jesus’ victory over sin, death, and the devil – a victory that
He shares with all who trust in Him and love Him, keeping and doing His word
and will.
In one place Jesus says that all who
call upon Him will be saved, but here He says that not all who call Him Lord
will enter the kingdom of heaven but the one who does the will of His Father. I
know that this may seem contradictory, but I say to you that it is not. While
it is true that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone,
nevertheless, faith is never alone, but faith is known by its production of
fruit, love, and good works. Again, faith without works is no faith at all, it
is dead, even as a tree that produces bad fruit is a bad tree and must be cut
down and thrown into the fire. But, you are not the tree! You are the branches.
If your tree is Jesus and His cross, then you will produce His fruits. As Jesus
teaches, “I am the vine and you are the branches; remain in me, and I will
remain in you, and you will produce much fruit.” It has been my ministry among
you to place the tree of Jesus Christ before you at all times. Everything we do
in the Divine Service is done to direct you to that tree. And everything we do
outside of the Divine Service flows from that tree as good fruit. As in the
Garden, there are two trees – the tree of Jesus Christ, and anything else. Only
the tree of Jesus Christ gives life; all other trees, though they may appear to
bring knowledge, give only death.
In today’s lections, both Jesus and
Jeremiah warn you against false teachers. Jesus says that you will know them by
their bad fruits. Their fruit is bad, because their tree is bad. Bad trees
cannot produce good fruit anymore than good trees can produce bad fruit. It is
Jeremiah, however, who describes what their bad fruit looks like: “Do not
listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain
hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD.
They say continually to those who despise the word of the LORD, ‘It shall be
well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say,
‘No disaster shall come upon you’.” I do not believe that I ever preached to
you “vain hopes.” Indeed, I preached to you the theology of the cross, that the
way of Jesus’ disciples is the way of the cross, that the world will reward
your faith with mocking, ridicule, and persecution, and that you should expect
suffering and receive it as God’s discipline because He loves you and would
rather you suffer now and live with Him in eternity than suffer eternally in hell.
Likewise, I do not believe that I ever told you could continue in sin and that
it would be okay, that God wouldn’t mind. There are many so-called Christians
today who desire precisely that, and sadly, there are far too many pastors
willing to accommodate. No, you must recognize these false prophets and pastors
by their fruits and reject them and flee from them. However, in order to do
that, you have to know the Word of God and remain fast in it. I have desired
nothing more for you these past fifteen years than precisely that – That you
may know who you are in Christ Jesus and that He might be your identity.
As I said earlier, I have always thought
of you as God’s children, purchased in Jesus’ blood, over whom I have been
given the task of caring for, feeding, protecting, equipping, and sending for
service in His kingdom to the glory of His Name. This is not merely an opinion
that I hold, but it is a fact that I know, “For all who are led by the Spirit
of God are sons of God, … and if children, then heirs – heirs of God and fellow
heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be
glorified with Him.” You suffer with Him when you reject the bad fruits of the
false prophets and do the will of your Father in heaven. You will soon have set
before you a choice, indeed many choices. I pray that you will discern the will
of your Father as you consider the fruits of the trees from which you choose to
eat. I have loved you like a father, which means that I have not always given
you what you wanted, but what I believed to be good for you. Indeed, this is
precisely why pastors in some traditions are called Father. Though I do not
have that title, I have that office and I have always thought of you as
spiritual children – not my children, not children of the world, but children
of God. I will always think of you this way, and I will keep you in prayer even
as I ask that you will keep me in your prayers. This is the beginning of our
farewell discourse, but just as Jesus remained with His disciples differently
after He left their presence, so will you be in my heart and mind and prayers
as God provides you a new pastor to continue the good work He has begun in you.
He will not leave you or forsake you. Indeed, nothing can separate you from His
love. He is with you always, even to the end of this world.
In
the + Name of Jesus. Amen.
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