The Lutheran Church is a dying church. This may initially sound upsetting, even radical – but on this Sunday of our Lord’s Passion, it’s worth pondering for a few minutes. We are a dying church. We have always been a dying church. By God’s grace, we always will be a dying church.
I can tell by the looks on your faces that you’re wondering just what I am talking about. Well, let me ask you this: do you think that being a dying church is a bad thing or a good thing? My answer to that question is “yes” – it’s both good and bad news. It’s mostly good in the end. I realize that most of what I have said so far doesn’t seem to make sense, but I’m going to urge you to be patient and bear with me for a little while this morning. In a few minutes I think it will all make perfect sense.
You can go on the internet and do a search for membership trends in the Christian church, and with a few rare exceptions, most of what you’ll find is very troubling. Overall church membership and attendance are not growing – they are declining. One Lutheran scholar who studies these matters has predicted – and I pray that he is wrong – that if membership losses continue at current rates, then the ELCA will be dead by 2046 and the LCMS will be gone a few years later.
Now on one level, we would all agree that news of a loved one’s death is never a happy thing. News of our beloved church’s potential demise is equally sobering. But that’s not why I say that we are a dying church. No, the real reason I say this is because of people like my friend Dick, a man I met when I began my field work assignment at Our Hope Lutheran Church in Huntertown, Indiana.
The pastor had invited me to join him on a visit to bring the Lord’s Supper to Dick and his wife Janet. Dick was probably somewhere in his early 70’s, and he had been battling cancer on and off for a decade or more. The cancer had recently spread to his bones, and he suffered a very painful broken arm merely by brushing against the side of a doorframe – something that would not even raise a bruise for most of us. He was getting ready to begin another round of chemotherapy, and his doctors had told him that this was the final treatment that they would be able to give him. There were no other drugs, no other treatments. This was it.
But Dick wasn’t afraid. In fact, he joked that he really had the best of all possible worlds. He said that if this treatment worked, then he would have more time with his wife and family. And if it didn’t work, then he was going to be with Jesus. After he received the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, he leaned back in his chair, and we saw a small tear in the corner of his eye. It wasn’t a tear of sadness; it was a tear of joy that was joined by an enormous smile on his face.
My friend Dick was not afraid to die. He could smile at the prospect of death, because Dick was a member of a dying church. He had prepared for this day all of his life, and he had already done all of his dying – the hard part, that is – many years ago when He was baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. You see, membership in a dying church has its privileges and its power. Dick knew that power and that privilege. It made him smile in the face of death. And we all smiled with him.
The privileges of membership in a dying church far outweigh the drawbacks! I know, we sometimes worry about numbers – attendance numbers and contributions to the expenses of running the Church – but lately attendance has been up, and when you average it out our contributions adequately cover expenses. We’re also concerned about damaging moisture getting into the Church foundation that needs to be addressed, very probably an expensive problem to fix. But we know that these are earthly problems – not eternal problems – and so we follow a Lord who calls us to die with Him. We follow the Master, who pulls eternal life from the grave like a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat and who invites us all to share His joy by taking up the cross ourselves.
Jesus once had a crowd of over 5,000 men – and untold thousands of women and children – flocking to Him after He had miraculously fed them in the wilderness. But after telling them that the true food and drink was His flesh and blood, He watched that crowd dwindle to 12. Did Jesus fret over that? Did he fear? Did He change His message or His manner? Did he start toning down all of that hellfire and damnation talk so that His audiences could hear an upbeat, uplifting message? No. He simply asked the disciples if they wanted to go away, also, which gave Peter the opportunity to say: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
Another crowd gathers in today’s Gospel lesson, an angry crowd with swords and clubs, a crowd that came to Gethsemane to arrest Jesus and kill him. They are led by Judas, who betrays his Lord – his friend – with a kiss. Peter lashes out with his sword, but Jesus tells him to put it away, and then Jesus heals the servant whose ear had been cut off. Jesus reminds them that Scriptures had foretold this happening, and the Scriptures must be fulfilled. The dying that will take place in those next hours will not be a bad thing, but a good thing. A very, very good thing. It will be life for a dying world and a dying church.
You would never betray Jesus like Judas did, would you? Certainly not – at least, you would never want to betray Him. But He is betrayed with our kisses again and again. We betray Him with a kiss when we try to keep him from leading us to His dying church. We betray Him when we tell people not to bother taking up the cross to follow Him – but replace the cross with principles and guidelines for victorious living or the purpose-driven life or living your best life now and use Jesus as a springboard to successful living. We betray Jesus when we say so many nice things about Him and make Him the leader of our fads and buzzwords and self-help programs, all of which are designed to give prestige and power to those who follow us on our journey for enlightenment. The goodbye kiss is never really very far from our lips – and we delude ourselves into thinking that we are really doing just what Jesus really wants us to do for Him. Instead of looking at what Jesus has done for us.
After Judas’ kiss, all of the disciples forsook Jesus and ran away in fear. And we’ve been there, too, haven’t we? When the chips are down, when things look bad, it’s easy to slip quietly out the back door. The last one out, turn off the lights. “Sorry, Jesus, it just wasn’t meant to be, You and me. Not this time – maybe later.”
There is so much denial and death in our Gospel lesson this morning! Peter denies Jesus – after all, who wants to admit to being part of a dying church? Caiaphas and Pilate condemn Him because a dying Messiah is not for them. The crowd chooses Barabbas because he, at least, resists dying. As far as everyone and anyone can see, Jesus just seems to give in. So they mock Him. They crown Him with thorns. They lead Him away. Simon is the one who ends up carrying the cross, but that’s only because they make him; it wasn’t his choice, not by a long shot.
After more mockery of the dying King, he is forsaken even by His own Father and He dies in torment. All alone. A dying church. A church of one dead man.
But it’s strange. At the moment of His death, our Lord finds a friend – a convert. The centurion sees Him die, and in this death he sees a victory over death and hell. Filled with awe and amazement, he confesses: “Truly this was the Son of God!” And then there were two.
From that moment on, a dying church grows. Some of the soldiers get pulled in, then the women at the empty tomb, then the remaining 11 disciples, then a few thousand on Pentecost, then – well, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The point is that I got pulled into this dying church, and so did you – the day you were baptized! You get pulled in every time the Word of the cross goes in your ears and meets with faith. You get pulled along by the body and blood of the crucified, put in your mouth here and now. And while the dying is difficult in itself, even bad, the results are fantastic! Dying with Jesus, you now live. Because He conquers death, all who share His death also conquer death. They even smile at it, right along with my friend Dick and all of the saints.
We are members of a dying church, the Church of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, the Evangelical Lutheran Church. We are members of a dying church, and therein is all of our hope and joy. In this is our strength for today and our victory ever death.
Membership in a dying church has its privileges and its power – privileges and power for you and for me, freely given to us by the one who died and then rose from the dead. It brings the peace that truly surpasses all understanding and guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
This sermon is freely adapted from materials originally appearing in “Concordia Pulpit Resources,” published by Concordia Publishing House.
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