[Machine transcription]
Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you, from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, the text for this morning’s sermon comes from the Gospel reading. You may be seated. I received kind of an unsettling email yesterday afternoon. It was a cry for help. A cry for help for a young man who I haven’t talked to for over three or four years. But I’ve known this young man since he was a second grader. This young man had found himself overwhelmed, suffocating, and he, like we, needed to hear again what John proclaimed in this morning’s text: Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
When it comes to your and my sin that this Lamb takes away, this sin is not an abstraction. Abstractions are what Satan doesn’t want to deal with. He wants to deal with things that really strike at your and my core. Sin is never alone. Accompanying sin in an intimate way always is guilt. Oh, that’s his playground, isn’t it? Satan loves to assist us in heaping that upon ourselves. And the other one is the consequence of sin. He loves to be right there, shoveling it on with us. Because sin is never without those two attributes: the guilt and the consequence. And that’s his playground; that is Satan. That’s where his works are done, using those two mediums in which to torment, suffocate, and cause us great weight on our shoulders.
We think, I can bear up under that. I don’t need to tell anybody what’s going on inside of me. It’s just between me and God. That’s not God talking. That’s Satan. And this young man had drank that Kool-Aid, just like you and I have drank that Kool-Aid more than once, thinking that we don’t need to say anything to anybody because we really don’t want them to find out about what we really are on the inside. We don’t want to have them lower their esteem of us because they find out something that’s risky about us. And that pleases Satan. As we’ve said before, there’s nothing more alone than a sinner alone with his sin. And that’s where this young man was: alone with his sin.
But there’s only one who bears the sins of the world. The guilt of the world. The condemnation and consequence of sin. And that is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The one whom John proclaimed here boldly, loudly. The sacrificial Lamb. The one about whom we sang just a few moments ago. Where we sang: A lamb goes uncomplaining forth, the guilt of sinners bearing, and laden with the sins of earth, none else the burden bearing. Goes patient onward, grows weak and faint to slaughter, led without complaint, that spotless life to offer. He bears the stripes, the wounds, the lies, the mockery, and yet replies, all this I gladly suffer.
John saw the anointing. John saw the seal of the Holy Spirit descend upon Christ in his baptism, and he witnessed it and declared it, as the text said this morning, and said, this is the Son of God. That’s no small statement. This is the Messiah, the anointed one. Profound indeed. You know, we just finished the Christmas season, and you saw all kinds of pictures of the nativity scene with Jesus in the manger and Joseph and Mary there. And it always looks so peaceful and serene, and rightly so. But I came across this one artwork. Very interesting indeed. It has the manger scene with Joseph and Mary and baby Jesus. And then almost out of place in the background, there is a cross just like that one, with a body on it, just like that one, behind this serene scene. And yet that is what the baby was born for, wasn’t it? To be the sacrifice. To be the lamb. The perfect lamb. The one whose blood would pour from him and pay and cover your and my sins. This is what John proclaimed.
He proclaimed this declaration. This declaration has been used by God’s Holy Spirit to draw you and me to Christ over and over and over again. And in this morning’s text, this same proclamation drew two disciples who were following John to stop following John and begin to follow the Lamb, Jesus. Now it’s not as if what John said that morning when this statement was said was a revelation to the disciples. It was as if the disciples had never heard this before from John’s lips. John had been proclaiming this about the Messiah ever since he began to preach. His disciples had heard about Jesus being the Lamb; they had heard about him being the one who’s going to pay for everything. Jesus was told to these disciples by John over and over again. Finally, finally, the Spirit did his work, and these two stopped following John the Baptist and began to follow Jesus.
It wasn’t as if that was going to be a better road, though, because you know what happened to John, and you know what happened to Jesus. Death for both, but life that followed. Jesus asked these two that were suddenly following him a very poignant question: What do you seek? What do you seek? Indeed, what do you seek? Is Jesus the one who fixes your family and makes it all better? Maybe he’s not, because you and I can go to our grave with our family not being reconciled, can’t we? Is Jesus the one who takes care of the world and makes sure everything looks rosy outside? There’s a lot of people in Syria who go to sleep every night. Their faith cries out, God is in control, but their flesh screams everything is chaos and out of control.
What do you seek? And that’s the question ultimately that this young man has to wrestle with. Do I seek someone just to fix this one problem that I’m going through, this crisis, and then I’m done? Now, it’s not as if this young man hadn’t heard this story before either. This young man has gone through preschool, through eighth grade, into parochial school and heard it. He was in the pew every single Sunday with his mama. He was surrounded by friends and family members who continually upheld this young man and his faith, hearing it again and again and again, just like these disciples who were following Jesus now. Just like you.
The only thing Jesus really brings to bear, and he does it, is forgiveness of sins, the guilt and the consequences, wiping them clean. As we sang, he’s the one who takes them upon himself. This is what he invites them to come and see what it’s all about. This is what you sang about as well when you sang: this lamb is Christ, the soul’s great friend, the lamb of God, our savior, whom God the father chose to send to gain for us his favor. Go forth, my son, the father said, go, and free my children from their dread of guilt and condemnation. The wrath, the stripes are hard to bear, but by your passion, they will share the fruit of your salvation.
The guilt of sin and the consequence of sin, which you have experienced, and you have wrestled with, and you have felt its suffocating hands around your throat, can only be borne by the Lamb, not by you. Not by keeping it silent within your bones. It will break you. Not by keeping it away from other people’s knowledge. It will crush you. Only by letting the lamb bear it. Because either we carry the guilt to hell, or we believe that he carried it to hell for us. Either we bear the condemnation and the consequence of sin, which is hell, or we believe in the one who carried the consequence and condemnation for our sin to hell.
There’s only two repositories for guilt and condemnation and consequence: us or our Lord. This is why we must keep hearing these things over and over again, no matter if we’ve heard them and can recite them over and again as well. This is what this young man has to keep hearing, or he will die just like you, just like me. Die not the physical death, but die the spiritual death, which is far more frightening. God’s forgiveness always triumphs over guilt. God’s forgiveness always triumphs over the consequences of sin. It is what completely frees you. It is what lifts you up out of the water, gasping for breath and coughing, and brings you life. It always wins. Though you may go to your grave with a broken life, you will go to your grave with a renewed and completely free soul.
He may go to his grave living with the consequences of bad decisions, but he’ll go to his grave as a believer: free, just like me and just like you, from the consequences of choices that we’ve made. Why did the church a thousand more years ago say, Because there is our meat and drink indeed, and our faith feeds upon no other. There is where guilt is triumphed over and crushed. There is where the consequences of sin are completely swept away.
Now, this forgiveness doesn’t just sit there. It accomplishes things in you, as it did these disciples. What did it do to them? It caused Andrew to go talk to his brother Simon Peter and say, Come, come and see. You don’t think Peter thought about Andrew loving him enough to come and see him when Peter had heard that cock crow the third time and said, my God, thank you, Lord, that you sent my brother to tell me about this Jesus whose forgiveness is now mine in spite of my knowing my denying him.
This is the only answer to my guilt. What? I never knew when or if this young man would ever call or contact me. I knew he had kind of left the path. I knew he had kind of chosen some decisions and made some very poor ones in spite of what he had been given. And I don’t know why God had brought him into my life or me into his life, but God had a purpose. God accomplished his purpose as much when his life seemed so serene and sweet to him, as much as God accomplished it now, having brought him to his knees. God has done that in your life. And God uses people to tell you again the Lamb of God was slain for you.
And then God uses you, who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, to tell the other people who need to hear again that it’s the Lamb of God who takes away their sin. It’s not all chance. It’s not all happenstance. It is divine indeed. This is why we need to hear this again and again and again for our soul’s sake: the peace and freedom that it brings us, and the people he places in your life and you in theirs to share that freedom and that peace.
In the name of the Lamb of God who has taken away your sin and has given you peace, Jesus, the Messiah. Amen.
