We are now moving into the Sundays of Easter with the 2nd Sunday on March 30, 2008. The three readings are Acts 5:29-42, I Peter 1:3-9 and John 20:19-31. The text is John 20:23, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

When first-time visitors to a church hear the pastor say, “I therefore forgive your sins,” a number of questions come to mind. “Where did this pastor get the right to forgive anyone’s sins?” “Only God can forgive sins; certainly not a human being.” “It is possible to forgive someone who has done something against you but how can you forgive someone who has done something against God?”

The problem with these questions is that there is a mix-up between having the power to forgive sins and having the authority to forgive sins. For example, can a human being make a decision that another person should die? While we would agree that there is no intrinsic right or power to make such a decision, a human being who is a judge may have the authority to have a murderer executed.

Those who question whether pastors, or for that matter, anyone, has the power to forgive sins, need to turn their direction to the One Who has the power to forgive sins and that is God alone. But what God has done is to have human beings say the words of forgiveness. And because the words of forgiveness can be used by the Holy Spirit to create faith and forgive sins, any Christian can be said to have the authority to forgive sins.

In fact, you do not even have to be a Christian. For the power of forgiveness does not reside in the faith of the person who is speaking but in the Word which is spoken. Therefore, if an atheist was hired to make a CD of the Bible, his voice would be used by God to bring unbelievers to faith through hearing the words of the atheist!

The reason that anyone can speak the word of forgiveness; that is, the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, is because the power of salvation is found in the words spoken or read. In fact, we know of no other way in which God works salvation apart from a hearing/reading of the word of God especially in connect with the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

While the called pastor is the one God has assigned to forgive sins publicaly in a worship service, any person can forgive sins because the power is not in the obedience of the individual but in the promise of God. John, chapter 20, ends with verse 31 that the words of this book are “written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.”

On March 23, 2008, we celebrate one of the earliest dates possible for the celebration of Easter. There are four possible readings because beginning with the Easter season the book of Acts becomes one of the readings instead of the Old Testament although an OT reading is listed. The four readings are Acts 10:34-43 or Jeremiah 31:1-6, Colossians 3:1-4 and Matthew 28:1-10. Selected for a sermon text is Acts 10:35, “But in every nation whoever fears Him and works righteousness is accepted by Him.”

Why choose such a text for the celebration of Easter? Would not the Matthew 28 record of the resurrection be more appropriate? In reality, since all Scripture is “Christ centered, cross focused” (Issues Etc.)means that every passage of the Scripture can be linked to Easter Sunday. The elements I attempted to include in every sermon were the cross, the resurrection, baptism and the Lord’s Supper all from a Law/Gospel perspective.

The apparent problem with Peter’s sermon in Acts 10:35 is that it sounds like God will only accept those who are afraid of Him and are doing a lot of good works. In fact, some translations give that impression by the English words used. But what exactly does it mean to “fear” God, to “work righteousness” and be “accepted” by Him?

First, unlike religions of the Law which encourage a fear of God in order to do good works, Christianity reveals that doing good works out of fear of God is idolatry because it is the wrong motivation. Then what does it mean to fear God? The 1518 Heidelberg Disputation by Luther taught that if you ever do a good work and not be aware that it could be mortal sin, then it is mortal sin. The reasoning behind that statement is that every good work we do is tainted with improper motivation and therefore cannot possibly be a sinless good work.

The “fear of God” that every Christian has is framed well in the confession of faith used in some liturgies, “I, a poor, miserable sinner…deserve temporal and eternal punishment…” Proper fear is recognition that God has every right to send every sinful human being to hell for an eternity. That fear is a result of a proper preaching of the Law to mirror our true condition and hammer our egos down to size.

But what about working righteousness? What is important is that what counts is not how we regard ourselves as Christians but how God regards us. Because of Easter, a tremendous exchange took place when Christ Jesus took your sins to the cross and gave you His righteousness earned through His active obedience while here on earth. From God’s point of view, every Christian works righteousness; first and foremost through faith in Jesus Christ for full salvation. Thus, while having the right to send us to hell, He decided instead to send Himself to hell for you!

The final element in the verse to expound is the idea of being “accepted” by God. This is an unfortunate translation of the adjective. It is not a verb. The adjective can be translated as “welcomed.” It is also true that most people make a distinction between being acceptable and being welcomed. For example, parents may welcome all their children for a Thanksgiving meal, even those children who are not that acceptable because of their lifestyle or behavior.

A proper paraphrase of this verse could be: “And throughout the entire world, all who realize that God has the right to send temporal and eternal punishment and who are seen by God as doing fruit of the Holy Spirit, are welcomed to be His children.” You can hear a lengthier explanation of this passage on the Internet by going to kfuo.com and then click on the AM side, click Law and Gospel and listen to the broadcast for 3/17/08.

On Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008, the three readings are Isaiah 50:4-9a, Philippians 2:5-11 and chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. Our focus will be Philippians 2:8, “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”

While it is well known that Jesus is the personification of wisdom, it is not that well known how different is the wisdom of Jesus from that of the Palestinian world of His time on earth. For Judaism, which is a different religion than Old Testament Israel, a person was considered wise if he had the components of wisdom. These components included obedience to the Torah, following the ceremonial laws such as the Sabbath day, being wealthy and having a successful life.

Jesus turned the commonsense view of wisdom upside down. Not only was He known to have been conceived out of wedlock, but He had no place to lay His head, He broke many of the ceremonial laws of Judaism such as healing people on the Sabbath, He was not wealthy and He died the humiliating death of a criminal.

Yet it was about this Man that the Father said, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased.” How so? Because the wisdom of God is the foolishness of men. The Father was pleased with the Son not because of His successes but because of His faithfulness to the mission for which He was sent. Certainly, His own hometown wanted to throw Him off a cliff and after feeding more than 5,000 He had to flee from them because they wanted to make Him a bread king. Bit these are failures in the eyes of man, not God, for He remained faithful to proclaiming law and Gospel.

Even His message was counter to the wisdom of that day. “Follow me and you will be persecuted” and “Blessed are those who have nothing to offer God for their salvation.” Jesus was turning the world of Judaism upside down which drove people to thank God that they were not like other sinners (Luke 18).

But by far the greatest concern about Jesus on the part of many religious leaders in His day who were theologians of self-glory was His tendency to forgive people who were not worthy of such forgiveness. In fact, apart from the Holy Spirit creating faith and a new spirit within an individual, the message of Jesus was foolishness, not wisdom.

Palm Sunday reminds us of the beginning of a week that would recreate the world as this carpenter from Nazareth was determined to enter Jerusalem for the purpose of being put to death for you. Even the disciples did not realize that His being obedient to the point of death on the cross had been promised in the Old Testament (Psalm 22) and would result in the iniquity of us all being laid upon Him (Isaiah 53). The wisdom of the Gospel trumps the wisdom of the Law indeed!

On March 9, 2008 the 3 assigned readings are Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:1-11 and the entire 11th chapter of the Gospel of John about the resurrection of Lazarus. Chosen to elaborate on is Ezekiel 37:11, “The He said to me, ‘Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They indeed say, “Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off.”‘”

Is it not strange that very dry and dead bones are able to speak? Obviously this cannot take place in the temporal realm but is possible only in the spiritual realm. This text can be applied on three different levels: The first is the historic circumstance; the second is the parallel to our salvation and the third is helpful for evangelism outreach.

On the historic level, the dry bones refer to the house of Israel (verse 11) who are alive in the flesh in the Babylonian captivity but are dead in their attitudes and circumstances because of such bondage. What God is revealing through Ezekiel is that the people in bondage will be freed from their graves of oppression and taken back to their land where they will even rebuild the temple. Thus, the words of the bones refer to their attitude of being dead spiritually.

The second level is in regard to our salvation. How were we freed from the bondage of our slavery to the Law, to Satan and our flesh? Jesus took upon Himself the curse of the Law enduring being forsaken by His beloved Father for our sakes. Ezekiel makes clear that there is no altar call of dead bones or dead people coming forward to invite the Christ into our hearts. Instead, there is the sorrowful realization of how truly dead and hopeless we are, left to our own devices of salvation. This attitude is the work of the Law which results in our agreeing with, “Nothing in my hands I bring.”

The third level is how Ezekiel 37 helps us to witness to others. The Law needs to be proclaimed which is more than being explained. The Law needs to be executed as God did with the people of Israel by taking them into exile. So also, preaching of the Law is to be done in such a way that the hearer comes to the conclusion that there is no hope for salvation through anything he does, thinks or says. He truly is in bondage.

Then, the ground is prepared for the hearing of the Gospel which updated from Ezekiel 37:12 can be paraphrased as “Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your death, and bring you into the kingdom of God here on earth.” This can be understood with Romans 6 and baptism as a death resulting in a resurrection to life while here on earth.

Of course, the fullness of that promise will not take place until the Day of Judgment but even here on earth we dwell in a new kingdom (the holy Christian Church) through which we receive new life and salvation with the forgiveness of sins and the robe of righteousness. Ezekiel 37 speaks not only to Israel of old but also to you the new Israel as well as those who will become members of that family through a proper use of the means of grace (Word and Sacrament).