Sermon for April 1st

“Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” Jesus asks his disciples, Should I say, “Father, save me from this hour?” No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out!” Jesus is about to perform an exorcism of immense proportions and it will happen on the cross. Death will swallow up God’s Son Jesus one time on the cross, and then God will swallow up death forever by resurrecting Jesus from the dead. In the last petition of the Lord’s prayer, we pray that we will remember that the cross has the final say in our lives despite all the hours when we are tempted to believe the opposite.

Let me read for you from Martin Luther’s Small Catechism concerning the Lord’s Prayer, “Save us from the time of trial.” What does this mean? “God tempts no one to sin, but we ask that God would watch over us and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful self may not deceive us and draw us into false belief, despair, and other great and shameful sins. And we pray that even though we are so tempted we may still win the final victory.”

The gospel of John explains that the devil is a liar and the father of lies and that when he lies he acts according to his nature. We live in a world of darkness that is full of flashing neon lights, 60 inch Plasma TV screens and advertisements saying that the future is bright. But it is still a world of darkness. We live in a world of sin where all the news stories, psychologists and experts tell us that we are just getting better and better, more informed, more tolerant and more civilized. But it is still a world of sin. How appropriate that today is April fools day, because our lives as Christians is full of trying to decipher what is real and what is not, what is darkness and what is light, what is true and what is a lie.

Jesus was criticized again and again for what others saw as inconsistencies between who he said he was and what was happening to him. Between what Jesus said he was doing and what people saw that he did. For instance, he was called the “King of the Jews”, but his own people shouted “Crucify him!” People shouted, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross! Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” The Messiah was supposed to be strong enough to defeat his enemies, not be crucified by them. How could Jesus save others when he was about to die.

The Devil, the world and even our sinful selves would have us also believe this lie. Despite God’s promises, we wonder how God could really be in charge when our best friends, spouses and heroes die of cancer. We wonder how God could really be listening when sometimes things happen to us that go directly against what we have prayed for. We wonder how Jesus could possibly mean that no one comes to the Father except through him, when there are so many different religions, so many other faiths and so many people who don’t believe anything at all.

In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God to be holy for us. We pray for faith. We pray for things. We pray for forgiveness. And now, we pray for salvation. In his Heidelberg Disputation, Martin Luther wrote this, “A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.” We pray in the Lord’s Prayer that God would give us eyes to see the truth, ears to hear it and a heart to believe it.

What is a temptation, truly? It is a lie that we are encouraged to believe. At eleven o’clock at night, we begin to believe that ice cream will make us feel better after a hard day at the office when, in fact, it will probably only make us feel worse the next day that we step on the scale. When your marriage is in trouble, you begin to believe that the woman sitting next to you at the office cares more about your life than your wife sitting at home. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, they believed that they would be better creators than God who had created them. We pray that God would help us to call a spade a spade. To realize when the truth is set before us and when a lie is simply dressed in sheep’s clothing.

Finally, we pray that God saves us from believing the biggest lie of all, that death will have the last word. You see, when Jesus cast the Devil, the ruler of this world, out of the world, and promised you eternal life, the final word was spoken to you. “You will live with me forever,” Jesus said. But, throughout your life, everything except for Jesus, will tell you differently. The books you read will try to fool you into believing that all there is to this life is the pursuit of fame, honor or happiness. The movies you watch will try to make you believe that any idea of the afterlife is simply fantasy. When you watch a loved one die, you will find it almost impossible to believe that you haven’t lost them forever.

The Lord’s prayer is finally a prayer for trust. To trust that God will be God for us, that he will give us faith to trust him, that he will give us everything we need for this life, that he will not let our sins get in the way of his mercy and that he will be faithful to everything he has promised. For he has not only commanded us to pray in this way, but he has promised to hear us and THAT is a pretty special gift from the creator of heaven and earth.

So, we pray, that God keeps his promises. That God would save us, both our bodies and our souls, from death. We pray that despite all the lies we live with and believe in every day, that God might always remind us of the truth and that he would help us live in the light of that truth. Every day is April fools day for the devil who tries to tempt you to believe that he is still in charge of this world and what goes on within it. But more than two-thousand years ago Jesus died on the cross and in that moment, at that very hour, the Devil was driven out and you were brought into the love and grace of God forever. Amen.