Category: Articles

Timothy Sheridan

Since Adam passed off the blame to Eve for eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden, self-justification has thoroughly infected us. It rears its head in every aspect of our lives, especially when it comes to accomplishing that which Jesus taught us to do when we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

You can eventually squeeze an apology out of most people. But notice how often what seems to be a humble petition for forgiveness is qualified with something like, “I’m sorry, but…” It’s just as likely that when you’re supposedly the one doing the forgiving, you’ll manage to slip in a remark like, “I would never do what you just did to me.” In no time at all, you, the initially wronged, will commit a sin of your own, which you justify with something like, “I just call ’em like I see ’em,” as if the scathing remark you just delivered-rather than forgiveness- is the real solution to the problem.

We can’t escape self-justification. It’s embedded itself not only in our choice of words in our daily bickering, but also in the thoughts behind them, which we usually fool ourselves into masking with seemingly respectable intentions. When you ask somebody else’s forgiveness, the reason you qualify your apology with “but the reason I said/did that was because I feel strongly about…” or “I did that because I’m having a bad day…” you want the other person to know that you’re no monster. Your sin is not really as bad as they’re making it out to be. To be honest, they’re not completely innocent themselves, in this or in any of the other thousand situations that have played out like this before. You want to patch things up, but not before the other person comes to appreciate the fact that you haven’t struck out as magnificently as they’re letting on. Actually, they’re blowing things out of proportion. Ultimately, the fault is really theirs.

So goes our day-to-day thinking. That’s why withholding forgiveness is so pernicious. Our Lord warns, “If you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt. 6:15). At first, this saying sends up a red flag for us Lutherans. I thought the forgiveness of our sins was unconditional? If we have to forgive others in order to be forgiven, then doesn’t that mean there are strings attached to this whole salvation thing? So much for faith alone!

Well, consider what we’re saying when we refuse to forgive others. When you refuse to forgive someone who’s wronged you, you have set yourself up as lord over your offender. In your mind, you have the right to withhold forgiveness, as if that person will go unforgiven without your gracious pardon. But the reality is that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (II Cor. 5:19). Essentially, you’re appointing yourself the judge who distributes grace as though it belongs to you by right. When you hold court in this way, you-rather than God-are the justifier of the ungodly. This is nothing more than self-justification. At the heart of self-justification is unbelief, the original sin, our mortal affliction, the breaking of every commandment.

Which brings us to what Jesus really cares about when it comes to forgiving others. In one sense, He doesn’t really care about other people’s sins. You don’t have to confess other people’s sins for them. No scapegoats need apply when Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He knows the truth about your sins; He knows your thoughts and motives-the inner workings of your deceitful heart-better than you yourself, despite your outward protestations of innocence. Jesus doesn’t care about the sins of others. He cares about yours.

If you can’t find it in yourself to forgive others, don’t be surprised. In those instances, Luther says to pray for the grace to forgive. That grace, incarnate in the Lamb of God, given and shed for the forgiveness of all your sins, is God’s gracious gift to and for you. That grace is for those who debtors Jesus refers to in the Lord’s Prayer. We’re all debtors, so indebted to the God and His creatures we have violated that we are really worse than debtors-we’re beggars. The most desperate beggar isn’t the one who’s wronged you-it’s just you. But in Christ, God in His grace has paid all our debts. His grace is for beggars like you, and it will never fail.

Timothy Sheridan is a member of Our Savior Lutheran in Raleigh, NC.

Rev. Jacob Ehrhard

It’s entirely possible that your worst sin and biggest failure will happen after you’re baptized. If you were baptized when you were a baby, this is certainly the case (not a whole lot to do in the first few weeks other than eat, sleep, and fill diapers). Maybe your worst sin and biggest failure is even still ahead of you. It happens to a lot of Christians. You think that being a Christian bulletproofs you against sin. Well, maybe not the little ones-we’re all sinners, of course; but not those sins. Christians never do the Big Ones. But if you think this way you’re kidding yourself and the truth is not in you.

Does this mean that baptism has no power after all? Or, maybe its power wore off. Or, worst of all, does this mean that your sin is so bad that it’s more powerful than baptism? Can you really still sing God’s own child I gladly say it: I am baptized into Christ? Do the sins that you commit after being baptized count against you?

The Lutheran Confessions address this difficult question with an amazingly comforting statement from St. Augustine, a teacher of the church who lived around the turn of the 5th century. “Augustine speaks in the same way when he says, ‘Sin is forgiven in Baptism, not in such a way that it no longer exists, but so that it is not charged.’ Here he confesses openly that sin exists. It remains, although it is not counted against us any longer” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession II.36).

Good news! Baptism is powerful, and its power is still at work in you. And because you are baptized even your worst sins and biggest failures, though they indeed exist, they are not counted against you. Instead, the perfect righteousness and obedience of Jesus and His sacrificial death on the cross are counted for you. Not that you should keep sinning more because, hey, they don’t count anyway, but that your sins-big or small, from a past life or freshly minted-they cannot harm you. In Christ, your life is continually being renewed. How do you know this? Because of God’s Word.

“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:1-4).

Sin disturb my soul no longer: I am baptized into Christ!

Rev. Jacob Ehrhard is pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in New Haven, MO. He can be contacted at pastor.ehrhard@gmail.com.

Rev. Michael Keith

The Church uses weird words.

The first time I heard someone say the word narthex I had no idea what they were talking about. “Please sign the guest register in the narthex” I was told. I stared dazed and confused at the person making the announcement after Service. What’s a narthex? It sounds scary. Why would I want to go there? The Church uses weird words. However, they remain simply weird words if we don’t seek to understand what they mean. Once we understand what they mean, they’re awesome. I am going to use the word narthex a lot in this short article because it’s awesome.

Sure, we could just call it a vestibule or a foyer or a lobby but that’s lame. It’s a narthex. It is a narthex because it is there to do narthex-y kind of things to you.

What are these narthex-y kind of things a narthex does? What is the function of the narthex in a church building? It is the transition place from profane space to sacred space. It is the transition from the common to the holy. The sanctuary of a church has been set apart for God’s use. It has been set apart so that God can go about giving out His gifts to His people through Word and Sacrament. It is a holy place, a place set apart for use by God. It is the place where Jesus washes you in Holy Baptism, it is the place where Jesus absolves you of your sin, it is the place where Jesus speaks in His holy Word read and preached, it is the place where Jesus feeds you His Body and Blood. It is the place where Jesus is with His gifts of forgiveness and life for you.

The narthex provides a place of transition for you as you enter the church building. You are leaving the common, you are leaving the day to day everyday, and are entering into a unique place that has been set apart. It is holy because it is the place where God is present in His Word and Sacraments. Yes, God is present everywhere but He is not present everywhere with His gifts. Wherever God’s people gather together to receive His gifts is a holy place, a place set apart for God’s use.

The narthex gives you a chance to recognize this transition. The narthex is neither common nor holy; it is in between. Think about how you might act in the parking lot of the church. You might shout across the parking lot to greet a friend. There is nothing wrong with that in the parking lot. Shout away. Then, as you enter into the church building you might act a little differently. As you stand in the narthex you may find yourself having casual conversations with the people around you but you won’t likely shout at the top of your lungs at someone across the room. Then you move into the pew. You are in the sanctuary now (technically the nave but that is another weird word that we should talk about another time), you are in the holy place. Your behavior will reflect this. You will act differently in the pew than you will in the narthex because you recognize you have come into a special place. Then you come forward to the altar to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus. Your behavior before the altar will even be different than it is in the pew because you recognize the holy: the presence of Jesus and His gifts in that place. You may reverence the altar, kneel, bow your head, etc.

The narthex narthexes you by making you aware of this transition from the common to the holy. A foyer or lobby is just a place for sitting a waiting. Lame. A narthex is a place that makes you aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. You are entering the holy. You are going to be in the presence of Jesus and to receive His gifts.

Next time you go to church let the narthex narthex you. Be thoughtful and aware of what you are doing. You are leaving the common and entering the holy. You are going to receive the gifts of Jesus. And, in a short time, you will leave the holy place and you will walk into the narthex after having been gifted by Jesus through His Word and Sacraments. You leave a beloved, baptized, forgiven, child of God for the sake of Jesus. You then transition again and enter into the world forgiven and strengthened by Jesus to go to your God given vocations. The narthex narthexes you in this as well.

And if you see someone walking around your church building dazed and confused looking to sign a guest book – show them where the narthex is.

Rev. Michael Keith serves as pastor at St. Matthew Lutheran Church and SML Christian Academy in Stony Plain, AB Canada. He can be reached at keith@st-matthew.com.

Timothy Sheridan

The real trick with confession is believing that Jesus gives the same forgiveness to us here and now as He gave to those now justly famous confessing sinners found in the pages of Scripture mentioned before. We are forgiven and made whole because the Kyrie first and foremost Jesus’ own petition for us to His Father, when as He hung, mutilated and disgraced upon the cross, He prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Do we dare to think that God does not hear the prayer of His own Son, or that same prayer when we pray in His name, the name He put on us in Baptism?

We know how those previously mentioned pericopes turn out. We know that Jesus doesn’t withhold forgiveness from those sinners. Our forgiveness is the same. We know that at the end of those stories, the demons flee, vision is restored, and the chains of sin are broken. We’re in good company then when He extends the same promise to us. Our forgiveness is just as much a done deal as the ones in the passages we read in personal devotion and hear read in worship year after year, as done and finished as the agony and victory of Calvary (John 19:30) and just as final as His resurrection from the dead on Easter morning. We’ve been crucified and drowned with the One whose greatest delight is to be merciful to us who are just as desperate, depraved, and doubting as the sinners of old. We’re fed by with the very Body and Blood by the very hands that touched sinners and were stretched out on the beam of the cross.

The story of our salvation is just as certain as those other stories because it’s all Christ’s story. God’s love for us in Christ Jesus is just as certain and unshakable as it for David, the publican, Bartimaeus, and all the other legions of sinner-saints who have gone before us. Jesus answers our doubt-ridden petitions with mercy, not as if He were some tyrant who demands to see us grovel, but as One radiant and joyful, living in the power of His resurrection, who laughs, “But of course I forgive you! That’s what I promised, didn’t I?” If Jesus has taken care of their sin and accepts their confession by His pure grace, then He won’t have any qualms with yours. Or mine.

Timothy Sheridan is a member of Our Savior Lutheran in Raleigh, NC.

Did you miss Part One of Confessions about Confession? You can read it here.

Read Part Two here.

Chris Vecera

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. – Colossians 3:3)

We ignore all kinds of things. Depression. Pornography. Alcoholism. Divorce. Abortion. Put them in the corner, and pretend they don’t exist. Maybe more than any of these, we avoid thinking about death. No one deals with it well. It makes us angry. It makes us worry. It has a way of making us feel alone. We’ll throw around the sarcastic lingo, “I would rather die… than give a speech… than be nice to my family… than give up my pride…” but whether we admit it or not, we wouldn’t. We appear calm and collected, but we keep a secret. We’re afraid of death. “I shouldn’t be afraid. I’m a Christian,” we tell ourselves, “Why am I scared of dying? It seems like everyone else has their fear under control. I believe. I trust God, but the fear always comes back.”

Death plays us all for weak, lonely, and foolish people, headed for a host of stomach problems, heart disease, and high blood pressure. No matter how hard we look, no medication, diet, workout routine, or stress free living will prevent the inevitable. You know what, let’s just not talk about it… We’ve got to check how many likes are on our posts… A cigarette would be nice. A couple beers will calm the nerves, maybe a few hours of video games, or an afternoon of shopping for new clothes. Don’t tell us that we’re going to die. Despite our masks of hopefulness and contentment, we can’t handle that.

We’ve got Christianity wrong, probably because it’s not what we were told. It’s not about knowing God exists, and that he probably loves you. It’s not about believing and doing your best to be like Jesus. It’s not about getting your life together, submitting to God’s will, and getting a gold star. It’s not about eating healthy, staying fit, and having a positive “spiritual” outlook on life. This is self-centered, self-powered, and conditional spirituality: if you do this, then you will get that. If you don’t do that, then you won’t get this. The lie tells you: you can do it. What you do defines you. You can do it… except when you can’t. That’s the scheme.

Actually, we like it this way. Even though we are set up for failure, it feels safe. Our success is measurable, usually by the amount of things on our schedule. We know what to expect, and so we believe it… Until the cancer diagnosis. God, I was taking care of my body. Until the relapse. God, I had six months. Until the next fight. God, we were finally talking to each other again. Until the foreplay and fooling around go too far. God, we were trying to wait. In that moment, when you’re sitting in the doctor’s office, pounding your fists against the steering wheel, or crying in your room, the lie has devoured you. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve tried to do. You want to be strong, but you can’t seem to get a grip.

“…You can do it,” the lie tells you. It has many different voices, but it always attacks the same thing: God’s word of promise. So the whispers come at you… You’re a disappointment to everyone. You’re irresponsibly unhealthy. You’re a sex addict. You’re guilty. You’ve got no self control. You’re a cheat. You’re an alcoholic. You’re alone. You’re unloveable. You can’t stop yourself from dying, and eventually you’ll get what you deserve.

You aren’t afraid anymore. It might be from the world fighting against you or the standard of perfection that you can’t get out of your head, something is different now. With all the strength you can muster, you breathe in defeat, “I just want to make this all go away, but I can’t. I have nothing left.” You actually hope for death. It’s not “I would rather die,” anymore. Now you can only think, “I wish I was dead.”

Christians will offer some well meaning and sweet smelling advice, “God has a plan. Trust in God. Do you believe? Have you confessed? You need to get some help…” Not to mention the voices of the world, “Where is your God now? You have some God…” To you, the smell of those words make you nauseous because… putting perfume on death doesn’t do anything. You need something else.

None of this is Christian spirituality. Dear Christian, you have already died because Jesus has bled and died for you, and you share in his death. It’s not a death that you need to search for in the depths of your heart. It’s not a death that you need to rationalize with your conditional scheming mind. It’s not a death that you muster up the strength to accept. This death happened outside of you. That’s the way God works. He gives gifts through real concrete things, and he gives them to you.

In your Baptism, you died, and God made a promise to you, “Already you are clean because of the word I have spoken to you” (John 15:3). You are washed, cleansed, and forgiven because you have been buried with Christ in the water and the word, “We were therefore buried with him by baptism into death…” (Romans 6:4).

No spirituality in the world can rescue you, but the promise of God stands firm. You are already clean. You are baptized. You are united with Jesus in his death. Everything has been buried. Your sin. Your pain. Your regret. Your guilt. All of it. Jesus has taken it from you. He put it on himself, and he has given you everything that is his. His righteousness. His purity. His holiness. His peace. You are clean, and you are new, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). You are not what has already been buried. You are raised with Christ and united with him in a resurrection like his. That’s what is promised to you in your Baptism.

I know it doesn’t feel this way. Unfortunately, new creation isn’t what the Sunday school books told us. For many churches, new creation is just code for self-made and self-powered spirituality, “… Now, you can do it.”

The life of a Christian is not moral improvement and virtuous living. It’s actually the end these things. New creation is the promise, “I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5), and it has been given to you. New creation is forgiveness. Christian life is Baptism. New creation is Baptism. This means that when you are sitting in church, the flesh and blood of the home wrecker, the addict, the broken, and the terminal that you see aren’t the Sunday school new creations. They’re the dead ones, the bodies of death (Romans 7:24). Each day, they cling to God’s Baptismal promise: because of the death of Jesus, the sin they can’t forget has been buried, and He can’t remember it. On the outside it doesn’t look like it, but their sin has been separated from them. Just. Like. You. That’s new creation.

Christianity is not a conditional spirituality. It’s 100% receptive. You receive every blessing as a gift from God. In the body of Christ, you are the walking dead carrying the promise of forgiveness and life – a promise delivered and sealed in the waters of Baptism. Your life is hidden in these waters and words. It’s hidden from the world, a world that usually thinks you want to force Christian morality on everyone. It’s even hidden from yourself, you who fight to believe that the benefits of the cross are for you.

Jesus is coming again. You may fall asleep first, but you will not die. “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:3-4). You will appear with him and everything that is already yours won’t be hidden from your eyes any more. Everything that has been buried won’t trouble you anymore. Until then, the blood of Jesus covers you. Dear Christian, don’t despair. None of Satan’s lies will defeat you. You are baptized into Christ.



Chris Vecera is the Director of Youth Ministry at Lutheran Church of the Cross in Aliso Viejo CA. He can be reached at promissio5611@gmail.com.

Timothy Sheridan

Reflecting on Luther’s explanation of the Ten Commandments in the Catechism and being absolved every Sunday gave me perspective that I had never before had on the issue of confession. My personal practice consisted of naming the violations I had committed against God’s Law, but I never used the Law itself to reflect on my sins. My harsh words to a friend meant that I had committed murder in my heart, my lusting entailed that I had committed adultery, so the commandments weren’t completely neglected. But my way of confessing led me to believe that I was only guilty of certain sins and not others. I knew the Epistle of James says that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it” (2:10). In my mind, I really only transgressed the Law on a handful of discrete points. The evangelical subculture in which I was raised only stigmatized certain sins and consequently only fetishized certain virtues. I’d been conditioned to know I was accountable for all the Law, but only because I hadn’t kept it perfectly on a couple of points. Some sins didn’t need forgiving because I hadn’t committed them.

But then I began to pray the Ten Commandments daily. I saw my tortured way of confession for what it really was: a feeble attempt at self-justification. So I stopped the self-flagellation of carving out the ways I had offended my God and my neighbor. There was no need; all my sins were right there, numbered one to ten, staring up at me from the Catechism, in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy. Confession and Absolution taught me just what the Law incessantly declares: don’t argue your sinfulness. Confess it. The Decalogue will show you, as it showed me, that sinners break every single commandment God gave to the children of Israel. All the time. There are no exceptions. A person’s pet sins are only those that he or she commits happily and knowingly. Just because you aren’t aware of the times you offend God’s eternal will doesn’t mean you’re thereby acquitted (I Cor. 4:4). When the commandments showed me that I was guilty of breaking every letter of the Law, I began to repent by verbalizing each commandment and praying to the Lord for mercy.

For this reason, I love the Kyrie Eleison. It is the prayer of every sinner, bequeathed to posterity in the Church’s liturgy by the most desperate and deplorable of her ranks. The Canaanite woman whose daughter is possessed by a demon beseeches Jesus, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David” (Matt. 15:22). When Jesus seems to brush off her petition, she simply pleads, “Lord, help me” (v. 25). On another occasion, another parent among the crowd pleads for the Lord to cast out an evil spirit from his son. His petition is also spoken in the spirit of the Kyrie: “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) Two blind men on Jericho’s outskirts would not be silenced by the masses who think Jesus’ time is better spent on other things, but twice called after Jesus, “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!” (Matt. 15:31) In Jesus’ own parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, the latter knows that he brings only his sinfulness before God when he prays, downcast and dejected, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner” (Luke 18:13). Predating all of these are the words of the penitent King David, whose groanings, part of which have become the verse the Church sings as she moves from the service of the Word to the service of the Eucharist, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions” (Psalm 51:1).

We know the stories. The sinners receive the Lord’s mercy, just as He promised. Jesus forgives them and heals them of all infirmities, spiritual and physical. Despite His comments to the Canaanite woman or His innocent question of the blind men, “What do you want me to do for you?,” He doesn’t fool us. “Well, of course Jesus forgave them,” we say. It’s as the Scripture promises, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom. 10:13). But how do we know that same forgiveness belongs to us?

Did you miss Part One of Confessions about Confession? You can read it here.

You can read Part 3 here.