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For there is no distinction. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Amen. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints, I want to think today about this hymn that we sang, the – well, I don’t know, the second hymn that we sang today, Kyrie, Godfather. In fact, if you want to pull out your hymnals and take a look, Hymn 942, we’re using this… we’ll sing it again, in fact, so you’ll probably need that unless you have it memorized by now.
We’ve been using for the month of October this setting, Luther’s German Mass, where the canticles are replaced by hymns. Luther took… and this was a thing that was happening because the service was always in Latin and the people didn’t understand what was happening, and there was this press to get it into German, the language of the people. Luther was…it took some time to talk him into it, but finally the church there talked him into it, and so Luther actually took the Latin canticles, and he translated most of them into German.
So we sang Gloria in a Celsius, that’s Luther’s translation. We sang… we’ll sing in a minute the Sanctus, Isaiah, Mighty Seer, that’s Luther’s translation. All these canticles are… the Creed that we just sang, that’s Luther’s translation of the Nicene Creed into a hymn verse, it’s really great.
So I thought, you know what would be really wonderful is to look at Luther’s translation of the Kyrie. I was all ready for that, and this morning I went to look up when Luther translated it, when he wrote it, and it said author unknown. Maybe it wasn’t Luther. 1541 it showed up in German in Wittenberg, and I said, that can’t be right. My whole life I thought this was Luther. I went to double check, and sure enough, when Luther talks about the Kyrie, He says, just sing the old Kyrie and then go into this Gloria.
Anyway, we’re going to look at it anyways. We can pretend like Luther wrote it, because you know it actually has a lot of power. It’s really amazing. It takes the Kyrie, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy, and it expands it first of all to make sure that we know that it’s a Trinitarian prayer, that when we say that first Lord have mercy, we’re praying to God the Father, have mercy.
In fact, what the hymn does is it separates that Lord and have mercy. It keeps it in the Greek, but it fills in who the Lord we’re talking to, God the Father, and then the second one, God the Son, and then the third one, God the Holy Spirit. And not only does it say that that Kyrie is a prayer to the Holy Spirit, but it says, like the creed does, what the Father does, that the Father creates all things and sustains all things. That the Son is our King and our Savior, and the One who forgives us all of our sins. And that the Holy Spirit is the One who gives us faith through the Word and keeps us in the faith.
Now, if nothing else, and this is one of the reasons I wanted to look at this, is because every time we get together as a church, there are two things that we always do. Every single liturgy, it doesn’t matter if it’s Divine Service on Sunday morning, or if it’s evening prayer in Compline on Wednesday night, or if it’s Matins on some other day, or even any of the liturgy, any time the church gets together to pray, there are two prayers that we always pray.
One is the Lord’s Prayer, that makes sense, and the other one is the Kyrie. Lord have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us. And I want to expand that prayer so that next week when we pray it and the week after when we pray it, all the ideas in the hymn will be kind of contained in there.
So the first stanza, and it doesn’t indicate what are the stanzas, but we will be able to see it. The first stanza goes like this, Kyrie, God, Father in heaven above, You abound in gracious love, Of all things, the Maker and Preserver, Elishon, Elishon.
Here we confess God as the Creator, and I think one of our dangers as Lutherans and maybe one of the dangers of Reformation Sunday is we think of the major debate of the Reformation, which was the debate over justification, how are sinners saved, and sure enough it is, and we’re going to come back to that in a little bit, but don’t forget that we also confess God as Father and Creator, the Lord who made all things, who created the entire universe in six days, who built a garden for Adam and Eve and placed them there, the God who said, let us create man in our own image, in our own likeness, and male and female He created them.
We also confess God as Creator. That’s probably what we get most in trouble for nowadays, in fact, not the second article of Christ or the third article of the Holy Spirit. The world probably hates the church most because we confess the first article, God is Creator, because we confess that God created us male and female, that God has given us the gift of marriage and so forth.
But so we confess here and pray, Kyrie, God, Father in heaven above, You are the Maker and Preserver of all things. Can we sing that first stanza together? It’s not just the Lord’s mercy for salvation that we need. We need the Lord’s mercy also for this life, for the gifts of this body.
We know that if the Lord were to withdraw His hand that we wouldn’t… our heart would stop beating. We’d stop breathing. All the gifts of this life we also receive from the Lord out of His fatherly divine goodness and mercy without any merit or worthiness in ourselves. It’s all by grace. Our birth, our family, our home, our work, our food, our drink, our clothing, our shoes, our house, our home, our family, our neighbors, our friends, our future, all of this is pure gift from God the Father, maker of heaven and earth.
And if this were not enough, the Lord has even more. Seeing us in our sin, God the Father sent His Son, gave Him up for us all, sent Him into our flesh and blood and into our sin and death so that He might be our Savior, and this is the good news of the gospel, Christ is our King.
Salvation, do you see here in the second stanza, salvation for all you came to bring, O Lord Jesus, God’s own Son, our Mediator at the heavenly throne. That’s Hebrews 7, Romans 8, that the Lord is even now interceding for us, that the Lord would help us, eleison, eleison. Let’s sing that prayer together, the second stanza.
There’s a haunting line in the large catechism from Luther where he says, the death of Jesus benefits nobody. Now you can’t stop there. I mean, if you stop there, like what is he talking about? But Luther goes on to say this, the death of Jesus benefits nobody if God the Holy Spirit does not get the word of that death out into the world and into people’s hearts.
On the front of your bulletin, Jonathan has put this great Cronach, Weimar altar piece, and it’s a version of Law and Gospel, and it has the blood of Jesus, and you see the blood of Jesus is flying out like this. I was talking to one of the high school students on the way over here in the hall, and they said, Pastor, I thought this was a mistake, like the brush slipped, because blood doesn’t go like that. But I was looking at it, and maybe it’s on purpose. Yes, it’s on purpose. In fact, that’s the reason why the painting is there.
It’s a painting by Cronach, and that blood goes, it flies out of the side of Jesus and lands on the head of Cronach himself. He painted himself into the painting under the blood of Jesus, and that’s where our faith is. This is what the Holy Spirit does, is the Holy Spirit carries the blood of Jesus all the way from His side, and by the Word brings it straight to us.
So the Holy Spirit does the work of bringing the goodness and grace of God, the victory of the cross, and the forgiveness of sins won by our Lord Jesus, and bringing it straight to us. Through His Word, He creates faith, and through His Word, He sustains our faith.
And in this third part of the prayer, we’re praying to God the Holy Spirit that He would do just that, God the Holy Ghost, guard our faith, the gift we need the most. And then a prayer for the Lord’s blessings when we die, bless our life’s last hour that we leave this sinful world with gladness, oh that the Lord would give us that gift.
And how can we leave this sinful world with gladness? Because we have the Lord’s mercy and a good, clean conscience. So we’ll pray this third stanza together.
I don’t know if you knew that every time you were praying the Kyrie, you were confessing the Creed. Confessing God the Father, your Father, who’s made you and sustained you. Confessing God the Son, your Redeemer, who has rescued you and delivered you. We’re confessing God the Holy Spirit, who just like He was in the beginning of creation and was hovering over the waters, was hovering over the waters of your baptism and fills your heart now and strengthens your faith.
We confess God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and all His gifts for us. There’s something more though that’s happening in the Kyrie. It’s not just a confession of God’s mercy and goodness; it’s also a confession of our great need.
And this is what I want to kind of end our reflection thinking about, because whenever we are gathered here, there’s two hymns that come at the liturgy right at the beginning, and they’re really the opposite of each other. We come into this place, we begin in the Lord’s name, we confess our sins, we hear the glorious absolution that the Lord has put away our sins, and we pray and sing these two hymns right away, the Kyrie and the Gloria.
The Kyrie is the beggar’s hymn. Remember when Jesus was going with His disciples into Jericho, and there was a blind man in the gutter outside of the city, and he was crying out to the Lord, and what was he crying? saying, Lord have mercy, Kyrie liaison, Lord have mercy. And they said that they tried to quiet Him down, and He wouldn’t be quieted until finally Jesus brought Him to Himself and said, Son, what do you desire? And He said that you would heal my sight.
And then we immediately follow that with the Gloria. That’s the song that the angels sang to the shepherds outside of Bethlehem when the Lord was born, Gloria in excelsis, glory to God in the highest, peace to His people on earth. Now, we come into this place and we sing these two hymns, but the order is important and we never skip the Kyrie and there is a reason for this.
We come in here and the Lord says, okay, first I want you guys to go down there in the gutter with Bartimaeus and sing for mercy. And then I want you to come up here in the clouds and sing with the angels. But first the dirt and then the clouds. First the humiliation and then the glorification. First the confession of sins and then the glory of the absolution. First a beggar and then a glorified saint.
But here’s the problem, we don’t want to. At least I think this is what happens to me, when the Lord says, hey, why don’t you, Brian, why don’t you go down there in the gutter with Bartimaeus and, you know, kneel down in the mud with him and beg for mercy. I’m like, well, it’s kind of stinky down there. It just kind of smells, and I just don’t think that I want to be with the beggars. I just think I don’t need to be, I don’t think of myself as that lowly, I don’t think of myself as that bad, I don’t think of myself as that empty, after all, you know, I go to work and I’ve got gas money and I don’t need really to beg, I think I’ve taken care of everything.
And the Lord says to me and to you and to each one of us, look, you have to first be humbled before you are exalted. You have to first know that you are a sinner before you can know that I am your Savior. The key doctrine of the church is the justification of the sinner by faith, and this is so important, that we must know ourselves first as sinners. Jesus gives the warning. He says, those who are well have no need of a doctor but only the sick, and so we have to know that we are sick, that we are guilty, that we are corrupt, that we are lawbreakers, that we have deserved nothing from the Lord except for His wrath and His anger and His punishment and His condemnation.
And we have to know this first, because Christ is the Savior of sinners. So before He lifts us up, He brings us low. There is no difference. This is how Paul says it. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All of us are crying out for the Lord’s mercy. All of us come to the Lord with empty hands, empty buckets, nothing to offer, nothing to pay, nothing to give, only to receive.
There was a note that was found in the pocket of Luther when he died. Do you know about this? He died in, what is it, 1546 in Eisleben, same town he was born in, weird. He only was there for a few months of his life, but he was back there at the end of his life trying to heal a dispute. He preached a few times, beautiful sermon, but then he got sick, and they put him up and he was on the sickbed and they were visiting him and he confessed the faith and he died and they brought his body back to Wittenberg for burial, but they found a note in his pocket when he died, and that note said in German this, Wir sind begger, das ist alles.
We are beggars, this is true. We come before the Lord not as wealthy, not with something to offer, not with something to give, not with hands full of our own goodness or our own works or our own efforts, nothing like that. No. We come before the Lord as beggars, Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy, and the Lord hears your prayer and he answers it. He is merciful to you. He takes away your sin. He forgives you all that you’ve done wrong. He gives you the righteousness of Christ. His death on the cross covers all of your sins so that now the Lord lifts you up out of the gutter and sends you up into the clouds to sing with the angels.
Now look, if you were nervous about going down into the gutter, you maybe should be nervous about going up into the clouds as well. Lord, I can’t. They’re angels. They’re holy. They’re perfect. They’re exalted. They’re radiant. They’re glorious. They always sing your praises. You love the angels. I don’t deserve to be with the angels.” And the Lord says, sing the Gloria in excelsis. He lifts us up. He exalts us. He calls us to be Himself. He seats us in His heavenly places because He loves us.
So we, the Lord’s people, pray. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. And the Lord hears our prayer, and the Lord answers it. God be praised, amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.