Rooted in Ezekiel 34:11-16, this sermon proclaims Christ as the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost, binds the injured, and strengthens the weak. Drawing from King David’s humility and failures, it calls both church and government back to God’s Word. Through repentance, baptism, and the cross of Christ, the scattered are gathered into His fold and sustained by His mercy, peace, and eternal promise.
Faith Lutheran Church in Pinellas County is located at 1620 Pinehurst Rd, Dunedin, FL 34698. It can be contacted at (727) 733-2657. https://faithdunedin.org
Transcript
Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and our Lord, and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, King David, the greatest and most beloved ruler of ancient Israel, the one whose armies conquered all of her enemies, the one whose mighty men were of legend.
This king begins his confession in Psalm 23 with the words, The Lord is my shepherd.
This is true and godly humility demonstrated by a head of state.
David understood that the kingdom he now possessed, the victories that were under his belt, the loyal men under arms who pledged their allegiance, and all that he possessed, that these all were good gifts that came from his father in heaven.
They were given by him to be a faithful steward of that which the Lord entrusted.
He may have been the greatest living king of his time, but he certainly knew that this was not of his own doing, that this was a blessing that God had given him, that he was a man under authority himself, and he owed his fealty to the king of heaven, to Jesus Christ, to his good shepherd.
As one under authority, David understood that every action he took as king was to be aligned with God’s word and his purpose for the holy estate of the government.
He was God’s servant to keep the peace, to reward the righteous, to punish the wicked.
He bore the sword of God’s wrath to destroy foreign enemies that threatened the welfare of his people and to punish those within Israel who defied God’s law.
As long as he ruled according to God’s will, as long as he walked the Lord’s paths of righteousness, the people of Israel would know peace, would have rest beside those still waters in those green pastures.
They would not need to fear their enemies that surrounded them.
David, like all men, however, was a sinner.
Sometimes he failed to walk down the righteous paths of the Lord, and Israel would suffer God’s chastisement.
His failure to discipline his children led to his son, Absalom’s rebellion and civil war, costing thousands of Israelites their lives, including that of his son.
When he broke God’s command not to conduct a census, and he did it anyway, 70,000 of his people were struck dead.
Such disasters were the shepherd’s rod of chastisement, a rod that brought his erring sheep of the house of Israel back into his sheepfold.
For God desires not the loss of anyone to eternal death.
Not a single sheep should be missing, even when those who bear his authority on earth, those he charges to guard his sheep, even when they go astray and scatter the flock.
God warned Israel through the prophet Ezekiel.
Behold I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out, as a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered.
So will I seek out my sheep.
I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.
This prophecy spoke of the good shepherd, Jesus Christ.
Jesus invoked this very metaphor when he visited the house of an infamous tax collector named Zacchaeus.
Zacchaeus, when the Lord came to his house and dined with him, at no prompting from the Lord, Zacchaeus repented of his sins.
He confessed them and Jesus spoke to him.
Today, salvation has come to this house because he also is a son of Abraham.
Even this tax collector could say that even the IRS agents, even they are sons of Abraham.
For the son of man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.
This is the proper work of the Word of God, calling sinners to repentance and then pronouncing their sins forgiven.
When a man comes into the presence of God via the Word of God, it reveals the darkness of his heart.
The Word pierces the defenses that he’s built to deceive himself, to convince himself that he is righteous, that he’s a good man, that he’s really a nice guy.
The Word reveals is to praise soul for the purpose of bringing repentance.
Then and only then, once the man is humbled and brought to repentance, can the words of the Gospel come to bring peace and salvation through the faith in Jesus Christ, through the forgiveness of sins.
The Word leads the man of God to repent, and then to the green pastures of forgiveness, of faith and life within the church.
Good Friday was a day of clouds and thick darkness, a judgment day for sin.
It was the day our good shepherd laid down his life for the sheep.
There on Gogatha as his life poured forth into the dark soil, as the sun darkened, as the clouds gathered, the power of sin, death, and hell was broken forever.
It was just as Isaiah foretold.
Behold, I will lift my hand in an oath to the nations and set up my standard for the peoples.
They shall bring your sons in their arms, and your daughters shall be carried on their shoulders.
Kings shall be your foster fathers and their queens, your nursing mothers.
They shall bow down to you with their faces to the earth, and lick up the dust of your feet.
Then you will know that I am the Lord, for they shall not be ashamed to wait for me.
They shall not be ashamed to wait for me.
The Cross of Jesus Christ, the Crucifix is the standard in which the Lord set atop his Holy Hill of Zion, the standard that God has raised for his peoples, the standard by which he leads the nations to faith, by which he leads the nations to bring their sons and daughters into the sheepfold through the waters of Holy Baptism.
Here, with eyes of faith, we behold the nailed scarred feet and hands of our King, and we confess, my Lord and my God.
For he is risen.
We are risen, he and our father, Jesus.
And by our Baptisms into his death and resurrection, so too shall we arise in triumph.
God made it clear through Isaiah that he appointed kings to be our foster fathers.
They are to be his servants.
They are to rule faithfully that the preaching of the Gospel may go forth into all the world unimpeded.
They shall bow down to their Savior.
They shall worship at his nail scarred feet.
For they too are servants under authority.
When you think of our earthly rulers today, the first adjective that comes to mind is probably not servant of Christ.
Even those rulers who are Christian and behave as such, seldom receive such a moniker.
For in a hyper partisan political environment, to make such a claim is to invoke charges of being a Christian nationalist, or of attempting to establish a theocracy.
You’re some kind of dangerous zealot.
Even to critique our rulers by such standards, using God’s word as our standard, you would be cast as a dangerous modern day John the Baptist, and you would probably be beheaded figuratively if not literally.
As a pastor, I’ve been directly told through the ecclesiastical supervisors to be on the lookout for Christian nationalists.
Dangerous Christian nationalists.
When told this, I asked for a description.
Please point me to the scripture that I can use to identify these people.
Tell me who these people are.
Maybe I can put a wanted poster out in the narthex.
So we can all be on the lookout for these dangerous people.
As of today, no description or verses have been offered.
I don’t expect they ever will be.
The description isn’t given, for it would require those using the term to be specific.
And specificity invites debate and critique.
A vague boogeyman to invoke fear is more useful than an academic categorization.
When you get beyond the scare quotes, you soon realize what we’re being warned against is exactly what God requires of his faithful people, that the government and its people serve him.
That doesn’t mean that everyone in the government must be a Christian, but it does mean that our laws, that our governance, that everything the government does must be moral, just, that it must protect the innocent and punish the guilty.
It means that the church must not be hindered in its efforts to proclaim the Gospel, for that’s the mission of the church, not the government.
All of these are commanded by scripture.
All of these are consistent with the doctrine of the Holy Christian Church from the very beginning in the beginning of the church after the fall into sin.
The church has always recognized that God established the holy estate of the government once sin came into the world.
The government is specifically formed to restrain sin and sinners.
To do so effectively though, must be informed by the word of God.
The Holy Christian Church, another divine institution of the Lord is given to us so that it can inform the government concerning God’s word.
The pastors and the laity must, as Isaiah states, not be ashamed who wait on the Lord.
For when the church is ashamed of the word of God, when the pastors in the church are ashamed of the word of God, when they fail to faithfully proclaim it, then the sheep are scattered, the kings are misguided, and the nation will fall.
Jesus or I have come to tell you who to vote for.
We’re not telling you which political party is the holy one.
There are none.
Spoiler alert, there are no holy Christian parties in our world or in our nation.
Jesus came to call sinners to repentance.
Jesus came to forgive your sins.
He came to be lifted up on Calvary’s Cross as the signal, as the standard for all nations to behold and to come unto him.
Come and to find peace, to come and to find the abundant life, to find salvation in his name.
He came to call people, the church, and the government back to the word of God.
The serpent, our ancient foe, despite having been crushed underfoot by our Lord’s heel on Calvary, never ceases seeking to lead people astray today, to lead the nations.
He does this through his attacks on the church and her pastors, through attacks on the government and her rulers, through attacks on faithful families gathered in his name, which is why we’re to lift all of these up to the Lord in prayer, that he defend and guide them, that they all learn to rely on their shield of faith for protection against the fiery darts of the enemy.
The Lord continues to come.
He continues to breathe on his faithful people, speaking, peace be with you.
He continues to send them forth.
He continues to call under shepherds to serve his church, to faithfully preach and teach all that he has said, to go unto the world, to gather his sheep, to pronounce the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins.
I will seek the lost and I will bring back the strayed and I will bind up the injured.
I will strengthen the weak and the fat and the strong I will destroy.
God does all of this through the Holy Christian Church, the church that proclaims the full council of his word to those who may like or like it not.
The church that binds the injured in the waters of Holy Baptism, pouring forth God’s word and water to heal those broken by sins, pouring forth the Holy Spirit to anoint them with the oil of salvation.
The sheep are fed.
Sheep are nourished on the mountain of the Lord, Mount Zion, his church, as they participate in the body and blood of the Lord given for them, given for the forgiveness of their sins.
This is God’s mercy for mankind.
This is the gifts.
These are the gifts that he gave that all may hear, that all may believe, that all may find salvation in his name.
And here we remain until the end of days.
And the end will come.
Christ will return in his glory.
He will bring his angel armies and sin will be forever banished.
This is the Easter promise.
And this promise holds fast.
No matter how dark or how gloomy the world appears, no matter how good or how wicked our government may be, for no light was darker or gloomier than that which followed on Good Friday.
And the light of the world appeared to have been extinguished.
And yet, in the words of our Easter exultant, proclaimed on Holy Saturday, rejoice now, all you heavenly choirs of angels, rejoice now, all creation.
Sound forth the trumpet of salvation.
Proclaim the triumph of our king.
Rejoice to all the earth in the radiance of the light now poured upon you and made brilliant by the brightness of the everlasting king.
Know that the ancient darkness has been forever banished.
Rejoice, Church of Christ, clothed in the brightness of his light.
Let all this house of God ring out with rejoicing to the praises of all God’s faithful people.
Let this house ring out with rejoicing.
Let it ring with the unashamed joy at the truth of the triumph of our king, with the truth of his word.
Christ, our good shepherd, our good shepherd has forever banished the darkness of sin.
And you and all the saints of God are clothed in the radiant light of his glory, for he came to seek and to save the lost.
And he has done it.
He is risen.
He is risen in me.
In Jesus’ name.
Amen.
Now may the peace of God which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Amen.
