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A sermon is a manner of oral communication and therefore words and sentence structure/order would be added, altered, or deleted at the moment of delivery. + In Nomine Jesu + The Rev. Evan Gaertner Seventh Sunday of Easter The Healing of Christ This sermon was preached from an outline without a manuscript. The outline is provided… We live in a fractured world. Consider a man who has been taken to ECMC following a car accident caused by his drunk driving. The doctors work to bind his fractured body. After surgery the doctors assure him that his body will heal. He then finds out that the person in the other car died. He leaves that hospital with a patched body but a battered soul. But the fracturing of our bodies and souls are not limited to this man. We all live in a fractured world experiencing the effects of divisions, lack of love, entitlement, and resentment. - - We become weighed down with our efforts to try to heal ourselves. But following the path of sorting this out on our own actually brings us into a much more dangerous division. Our Lord God is the one who can heal the broken man. When we try to find our glory, our righteousness, our perfection on our own we actually become increasingly more divided from the healing work of our Lord. - Glory seeking at the expense of others Jesus came to bind up the broken hearted. He invited the weary and heavy laden to come to him for rest. The Father sent him to seek and to gain a different kind of glory. Jesus comes with the glory of God, a glory defined by expending oneself for the sake of the other. A doctor binds a severely broken bone with the pins and screws of his trade. Our savior binds our severely broken bodies and souls with the nails of the cross. We can be certain of the healing work of God through viewing the empty tomb and the resurrected Jesus. Our unity in this fractured denominational landscape will not come through our efforts of glory at the expense of others. Lutherans don’t have it figured out just because we are not like those Baptists. We rather must humbly come to the emergency room of the Word and find the caring hands of our savior. Soli Deo Gloria |
