This year’s Reformation Sunday sermon explores the new mission statement recently adopted by Christ the King: “Rooted in Christ, Nurturing Faith, Loving and Serving All.” What does it mean to be rooted in Christ? How are we nurturing faith? What does loving and serving all look like?
Today’s Scripture readings are Colossians 2:6-8, 12-14; Psalm 67; and Luke 4:16-21 as well as Luke 4:22-30 within the sermon.
Living Hope’s service for this week was a lessons and hymns service shaped around the five solas of the Reformation and did not include a full sermon.
Here’s the worship livestream from Christ the King as well as the sermon podcast audio:
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If you were at our visioning day a few weeks ago, you heard me read this Gospel passage from Luke 4. This is Jesus’ first recorded sermon, the first teaching we have from him in Luke’s gospel, and it’s really about how Jesus sees himself. This is Jesus’ mission statement.
He reads this great passage from the prophet Isaiah about what God’s going to do—release for the captives, good news for the poor, sight for the blind, proclaiming a Jubilee year—then he rolls up the scroll and says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing…this is about me.
This is my mission, this is my work, this is who I am.”
This isn’t the appointed reading for Reformation Sunday, but this day of marking the start of the Reformation is a great moment for us to think about who we are as a church today. So this morning, if you didn’t pick it up from the service already, I want to dig into our new mission statement.
Read it with me: “Rooted in Christ, Nurturing Faith, Loving and Serving All.”
I want to dig into how I understand these three phrases, how I see God calling us to live this out.
Let’s start with the first part. We are rooted in Christ. In good small catechism fashion: What does this mean?
I hope we’ve made clear over the last month and a half, you don’t need to have everything figured out to be part of this church. Doubts are ok.
You are welcome here whether you believe everything in the Apostle’s Creed or not, or if you believe some parts most of the time and struggle with other parts of faith.
In fact, I think I’m more suspicious of people who claim to have all the answers for everything than of people who are honest about our doubts.
But as Lutherans, as a Christian church, we are rooted in Christ. You don’t have to believe everything all the time to be part of this church.
We’re here to wrestle together. But our wrestling is rooted in Jesus Christ, in the belief, the confession, the proclamation that Jesus Christ is God with us, our savior and our Lord.
The first page of our church constitution says, “This congregation confesses the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This congregation confesses Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and the Gospel as the power of God for the salvation of all who believe…
This congregation accepts the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired Word of God and the authoritative source and norm of its proclamation, faith, and life.”
If you were at the mission statement workshop, you heard me say how important I think it is for our church have a mission statement that would not work for a public library, or a senior center, or a fire department. All of those are wonderful, important, vital community organizations.
But as a church, we have a specific role to fulfill in this world, an assignment from God. We believe we are the body of Christ, that God has uniquely trusted the message of salvation, the good news of the gospel to us as the church.
The whole Reformation movement is about calling the church back to our mission. We have a unique burden to share God’s love in word and sacrament. No other organization does that.
I remember my professor in seminary asking students after sermons, “Did Jesus have to die for this sermon to be preached?” What is it we can uniquely do as a church that no other organization can provide?
There’s a lot of ways we can live out the Gospel message, a lot of ways we can proclaim the Gospel and share God’s grace. The methods we use to share the good news changes over time, and we can disagree about all sorts of things. But everything we do needs to be rooted in Christ.
It’s no accident that in this room, the central focal point is the cross. We see God’s love most clearly on the cross, as Jesus lays down his life for us.
In the cross, we see the reality of human sin and cruelty, but we also see God’s love most clearly on the cross. Out of love, Jesus takes the sins of the world into himself, and puts them to death on the cross. He lays down his life for us on the cross.
Everything we do, everything we teach, everything we proclaim as Christians is rooted in the cross.
Paul says “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith.”
I love that we picked up on that word “rooted” in our mission statement, because it’s like describing Jesus as our foundation, but it’s more than just being something we’re built on top of. Jesus is our source of life. We grow because we are fed on Jesus.
The roots are what keep a plant or a tree strong. Without the roots, the whole thing topples over, but strong roots can push through rocks and concrete. Even as culture changes, even as the church is always being reformed, our roots are planted in Christ.
The roots nurture the plant, which brings us to the second part of our mission statement: At Christ the King, we are nurturing faith.
In this room, just below the cross are the table, the font, and the pulpit. The word of God read in Scripture and proclaimed in preaching along with the sacraments of baptism and holy communion are means of grace.
Everything we do as church is rooted in word and sacrament, these channels by which God offers us salvation in Jesus. This is how the Holy Spirit nurtures our faith
It’s Reformation Sunday, so that’s a very Lutheran understanding of what it means to be church. In fact—I don’t know if you know this, but church pews are a legacy of the Reformation. Before Luther, everybody generally stood during church, but Luther’s focus on the preaching of the word led to longer sermons, so pews became more common.
We live out this mission of nurturing faith by studying God’s word, by praying together, by serving together. Teaching, supporting, lifting each other up, helping each other to grow—these are all the Holy Spirit working, nurturing faith and forming us as disciples.
One of the words that came up over and over in this visioning process was family—I like that nurturing has a family feel. We all come from different backgrounds, different experiences, but we help each other and nurture each other as a family. The Holy Spirit works through us as a community.
In the mission statement graphic, I appreciate the leaves growing on the tree. When we are rooted in Jesus, when we nurture each other in faith and the Holy Spirit gives us growth, we bear fruit. Jesus says in Matthew 7, you will know them by their fruit.
We are known by the fruit we bear as a church. Our fruit is how we impact the world around us, how we love our neighbors.
One of the questions churches should constantly be asking is if what we’re doing here makes a difference. Would anyone notice if we weren’t here? And I do believe what we do makes a difference.
We’re a small group of people, but the ways we love our neighbors by supporting the food pantry, making meals for Family Promise, sending quilts, giving money to ministry partners, that all makes a difference. We’ll never meet them, but there are 91 parents who are receiving the baby care kits our congregation provided who would care very much if we weren’t here, if we weren’t bearing good fruit.
But in addition to that, I want to highlight the how important our message of grace is. This Reformation idea that God’s salvation is given by grace rather than earned is so radical, so countercultural today, even among some other Christians.
Because if God’s salvation is a free gift given by what Jesus has done rather than what we’ve done, if we don’t deserve grace but God gives it anyway, then the good news of the Gospel is for everyone.
Our mission statement says at Christ the King, we are “loving and serving all” and that ought to be the baseline for Christians.
But that’s not the message some of the loudest voices in our society are sending, voices that claim to be representing Christianity.
If God’s grace is for everyone, then everyone is welcome at God’s table. No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, you are welcome in God’s family. There is a place for you at the table.
No matter what your immigration or citizenship status, no matter what language you speak, or who you love, or what teams you root for.
No matter how much money you have, or your gender, your singing ability, how old or young you are, your physical or mental abilities, you are a beloved child of God.
God’s love is for you. And you are welcome here.
Our neighbors need to hear that message. We need to proclaim that message loud and clear. Humbly, lovingly, peacefully, but our mission is to insist on love, to insist on justice for all, to insist that every single person has value, because God’s grace is for all.
And let’s be honest: That’s a controversial message. Let’s go back to the Gospel reading and look what happened to Jesus.
The story we read in chapter 4 started great. Jesus came to Nazareth, his hometown, and read God’s promise from Isaiah to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, all that good stuff.
In verse 21, “He began to say to them ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”
But then listen to the rest of the chapter. This is Luke 4 beginning at verse 22.
All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”
He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ ”
And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land, yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.
There were also many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Here ends the reading.
When Jesus reminded the people of God’s promises to set them free, to release them from their captivity, they loved it. Wow, look how Joseph’s boy has grown up, what a great preacher he is.
But then Jesus went too far for them. He reminded them of some of those times in their history, these stories they knew where God had helped the other people, the outsiders.
A foreigner gets food during a famine. Naaman the Syrian is cleansed from leprosy.
Jesus’ point is clear: God’s grace is for them too. Not just for us, but for them. For those people over there. Even the ones we don’t like.
All in the synagogue were filled with rage, to the point where they tried to hurl Jesus off a cliff. But Jesus walked right through their midst—God’s mission could not be stopped.
Our mission as a church is not always easy. There’s not very many of us. We don’t have huge reserves of money.
But God has entrusted the message of the Gospel to us, and that’s enough. The Holy Spirit is equipping us to be the body of Christ, to carry forward Jesus’ own mission of liberation and reconciliation.
As Christ the King Lutheran Church, we are rooted in Christ, nurturing faith, loving and serving all.
May Almighty God, who has given us the will to do these things, graciously give us the strength and compassion to perform them. Amen