Cantate 2023

St. John 16.5-15

May 7, 2023

The Gospels after Easter mostly come from what Jesus told His disciples just before His arrest. He’s preparing them for what is to come. It’s really the same for us. We live in an in-between time: Jesus is risen from the dead, but the world thrashes and rages in rebellion. These are the days before the judgment. What’s that time going to be like? Jesus tells us: “Sorrow has filled your heart.” That’s the fundamental condition of the world: sorrow. Life is pain; anyone who denies that is trying to sell you something. But that’s not how God made the world. That’s what man did to the world. Genesis 3 shows us the consequences of man’s rebellion: The woman has sorrow in conception and pain in childbearing, and the man has sorrow in work and pain in death. Man’s corruption brought sorrow into God’s good creation.

Much of life is spent denying that, imagining we can work our way out of it. When that doesn’t work, we self-medicate, attempting to drown the sorrow out through booze, porn, war, or get-rich-quick schemes. Everyone around us must experience our own rage and sorrow.

The confession of sins is the acknowledgement of the sorrow, and our own role in it. We acknowledge our problems can’t be blamed on our family, job, or government. To confess is to say, “This is my fault; I have broken God’s Law; I’ve put myself first and others last; I have lived as if God did not matter and I mattered most.” Even at church, aren’t we prone to look around and confess other people’s sins, instead of our own?

In our fallen state, God uses the Law to produce repentance in us. The Lord chastens in order to heal. The Lord kills and He makes alive. God’s Word says, “No chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” [Heb. 12.11].  God uses your suffering like a sculptor chiseling away stone: He’s removing what doesn’t belong, transforming you into His person. God puts you through trials to produce a godly man or a godly woman, one who can stand both now and on the Last Day and say with Isaiah, “O LORD, I will praise You; though You were angry with me, Your anger is turned away, and You comfort me.  Behold, God is my salvation, I will trust and not be afraid” [OT].

“You were angry with me.” An angry God? No one believes that anymore, do they? We moderns have moved beyond these old-fashioned ideas. Well, how is that working out? This is an important question that goes to the heart of the Christian Faith: Is the Lord an angry God, or a loving God? But we cannot ask this questions as though we get to determine the answer. Perhaps we should approach the question this way: Is there anything in man that indicates we have a problem?

Most people sense that something is deeply wrong in the world; everything from riots in the streets to the incredible rise of depression and suicide indicate this. The US surgeon general recently declared America has an epidemic of loneliness.

What’s been the response? American Christianity from Evangelicalism to the mainline churches set forth a vision of God as a feminized fuzzball of felicitous friendship. All have won and all must have prizes. Meanwhile, the “Tolerance” bumperstickers are gone, and politicians only make demands for reparations, recriminations, or retribution.

So is God angry, or loving? The question is far too simple. Ask a parent whose child is willfully disobedient: Are you angry, or loving? Yes. We are not God, so we don’t do the anger or the love right, but the answer is still, “Yes.”

Isaiah confesses the truth when he says to God, “You were angry with me.” Anger as a human emotion is perhaps always flawed. It is not so with God. His anger is not an uncontrolled passion, but the just judgment against our rebellion. God’s just anger is seen in the sentence of death upon Adam; the flood in the generation of Noah; the destruction of Sodom because of that city’s deep perversion; and two times destroying the Jerusalem Temple bearing His name.

God is angry, more than we imagine, at our rebellion, greed, lack of respect, lust, self-centeredness. and self-pitying – all of which is to say, our pathetic disregard for the love of God and neighbor.

But God’s anger is not “proper” to Him. It’s not who He is. In His Word, God shows us His anger is His “alien” work. Anger, wrath, punishment are foreign to God’s nature, for “God is love.” Love, mercy, kindness, forgiveness, that’s God’s “proper” work; it is who He truly is. On the cross, God’s anger was poured out upon His own Son, so that we can say with Isaiah, “O LORD, I will praise You; though You were angry with me, Your anger is turned away, and You comfort me.” And that is God’s answer to human sorrow.

The Christian message—the Gospel—is a positive one. At our core we are not “protestants” – living in protest of something. Being a Christian is also not at its core about protesting ungodly laws and social policies. Our life, our gospel, our joy is wrapped up in the three things listed as the work of the Spirit in today’s reading from John: (1) No sin counts against you, because you believe in Jesus; (2) Your righteousness is not in yourself but in Jesus, who goes to the Father as your Redeemer, your Mediator, your Intercessor; (3) The adversary, the evil one, the accuser has no power over you, for “the ruler of this world is judged.”

Because of the work of Jesus, you sorrowful people living in a world of sorrow nevertheless have joy. To be sure, there’s a struggle. On account of Jesus, God has declared you holy and righteous, yet you still have the Old Adam at work in you, urging you to not forgive the people you live with, not be kind to a stranger, urging you to look in lust at a woman not your wife, urging you to speak a harsh word to—or, behind his back, against—your fellow Christian.

Today, for you disciples of Jesus, the message of Easter is not only that Christ died and rose again so that you can enter the kingdom of God – it is that the kingdom of God now begins to manifest itself in you, as your wrath is turned aside. If the Lord has turned aside His wrath from you, why do you need to hold onto your wrath against others? Away with shouting and raging. But also, be done with murmuring, unkind whispering, grumbling against others. “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God” [Epistle].

Be free of what causes you anxiety, anger, or avarice. Your true joy is God Himself. The cross and resurrection of Jesus has set aside God’s anger. Yahweh is the God who loves, and creates, and gives, and forgives. He upholds the cosmos, yet loves you, His child. In Him shall we be content. This eucharist is moving you toward His telos for you and all creation: Joined to the body of the Crucified and Risen One, we shall enter into complete communion with Him at the restoration of all things, the Day of Resurrection. In Him “our hearts [are] fixed where true joys are to be found” [Collect]. In Jesus there is no more sorrow, only joyful waiting for the restoration of all things. +inj+

The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts in Christ Jesus.