Be Not Afraid

Propers: The Sixth Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Congratulations, Confirmands, on the completion of your catechetical instruction. For three years, you have studied the Old and New Testaments of the sacred Scriptures, along with the Small Catechism of the Lutheran tradition. You have read and prayed, worshipped and studied, as individuals, as families, and as a congregation. And you have come at last to your Confirmation, in which the Body of Christ shall pour out upon you all the blessings of the Holy Spirit, that you may be confirmed in the faith, welcomed as full and responsible members of our ecclesiastical body, anointed with holy oil, and slapped in the face.

Moreover, this is a moment of triumph for your parents, godparents, and all of us here in your congregation. Most of you were first brought to the font of your Baptism at an age when you could not affirm the promises of Christ for yourselves. It was your family, and your community, who promised on your behalf to live with you among God’s faithful people, to bring you to the Word of God and the Lord’s Supper, to teach you the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, to place in your hands the holy Scriptures, and to nurture you in faith and prayer, all so that you might learn to trust God, to proclaim Christ through word and deed, to care for others and the world God made, and to work for justice and peace.

Today is proof that your parents have kept their promises. And now you are called upon to keep them for yourselves. That’s actually why we slap you—gently, I promise. So that you remember the promises given this day, and bravely live them out.

Confirmation is not the end of anything. It is the beginning of a lifelong journey of faith, welcoming you as fellow travelers in our pilgrimage together through this foreign, fallen world toward the New Jerusalem and our true citizenship in Heaven. Today we confirm that before anything else, before any other identities or claims upon us, we are first and foremost Christians, marked with the Cross, bought with a price, subjects of the one true King of Kings who will return to claim His own.

And we need you out there. We need your strength and your faith, your insight and your questions. We are all of us members of the same Body, living stones of the New Temple. And this is no easy calling. To be a Christian is to never truly be at home in this world. We are called to love as Christ has first loved us, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and heal the sick and rebuke the sinner, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, and to witness always to the Goodness and Truth and Beauty of God.

We are called to be “little Christs” at work in the world—in short, to be Jesus for our neighbor. And we all know how the world treated Jesus.

Now, as Providence would have it, we are blessed this morning with two remarkable passages from Scripture giving witness to what it looks like to live as Christians amidst a pagan world: namely, the witnesses of Sts Peter and Paul.

The Book of Acts finds Paul this morning at the Areopagus, the Rock of Mars, in the dead center of Western civilization: Athens. Make no mistake. When we speak of the golden age of classical Greece, we are speaking of Athens: birthplace of democracy, philosophy, and theater, champion of the free market, dedicated to peace through the use of overwhelming military might.

And Paul says to this pagan society, so very much like our own, that God indeed delights in the wondrous variety of human cultures, in their variegated religions and pursuits of truth, “that they would search for God and perhaps grope for Him and find Him—though indeed He is not far from each one of us.” You worship Him already without realizing it, Paul tells the Athenians, in your piety and your poetry and all the beauty of your civilization. But the God glimpsed in flashes by all the religions of the world has come now in the flesh and made Himself known by becoming one of us, freeing us from sin and death, liberating our minds from ignorance and our souls from wickedness, that all might now be one in the Risen life of Jesus Christ.

And so we see how Paul lifts up what is good and true and beautiful in the peoples and societies he encounters: how, wherever Paul goes, God is there before him, preparing the way for Christ to be known in a new culture, in a new generation. Christ does not eliminate our individual identities, but in uniting God and Man in Him, He makes us into who we were truly meant to be all along.

There is good and evil admixed in all cultures, and right through the middle of every human heart. The Good News is that Christ sees us through the eyes of Heaven. He knows the good within us, knows our potential and our destiny as human beings, and so He purifies the good within as silver in the furnace, burning away the rest as dross. As Paul writes elsewhere, we are to test all things and keep the good.

Peter, meanwhile, in writing to a series of churches in Asia Minor suffering persecution for the faith, tells us to take heart. The Lord is not ignorant of our sufferings, he assures us. If we suffer for doing what is right then we are truly Jesus’ disciples, for the Lord Himself suffered and died for the unrighteous, for His very murderers, upon the Cross. And then Peter tells us something truly remarkable.

According to the Book of Genesis, sin was so rife and humanity so corrupt in the time of Noah that our every thought was only evil all the time. Can you imagine? Every single thought, day and night, only evil all the time. What utter horror. And yet, says Peter, when Jesus died—when His soul descended to the dead, descended into hell—these were the very spirits He had come to save! People whose every thought was only evil all the time! Jesus suffered for them, died for them, went to hell and back for them, to liberate them, to bring them up, to raise them to new life.

Grace of that magnitude, the immensity of that mercy, boggles the mind. Such is the power of Christ’s mercy to raise a world drowned in sin—the same mercy poured out for us, into us, that we might now pour it out upon the world.

As you enter your adult lives, dear Confirmands, you will be sent out into a fallen world, a world corrupted by lies and delusions and despair. Our society is as pagan as any that’s ever been, for indeed ours is a consumerist society, and a consumerist society is one founded entirely upon lies.

You will be told to love things as if they were people and to use people as if they were things. You will be told that happiness is to be found in selecting ever more options from a menu of infinite choice. You will be told that children are pollutants, old people are burdens, and family is for suckers. You will be offered therapy but never goodness; expedience but never truth; insatiable desire but never any real beauty to fill that empty hole within the human heart.

You will be told that if you buy the right things, pay the right price, then you will be young and beautiful and strong and respected and immortal. And everywhere you look there will be screens to distract you, to seduce you, to entertain you to death. In a consumerist society you are first and foremost a consumer, and the world and all the flesh within it are yours to consume. Of course, the problem with a consumerist society is that it ends up consuming you.

Don’t be fooled. You know the Truth. You are not your possessions or your pocketbook or your political party. You are a child of God. You are marked by the Cross and claimed by the Christ. You are the hands and feet of Jesus still at work in this world, and this world needs you. Read your Bible, love your neighbor, give freely, live bravely, speak truth to power, worship the Lord your God, and raise the dead wherever you go. Find the goodness, truth, and beauty in everyone you meet, and lift them up in the Light of Christ.

Be not afraid! Lies have no power over you, death cannot claim you, and darkness flees before the fire of the Spirit that burns within your breast. This is what it is to be a Christian, the mission we share for the sake of the world.

Love the world. Save the world. And trust in Christ, your King.

This is the faith in which you are confirmed.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.