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Grace, mercy, and peace be upon you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear brothers and sisters, all three texts will be used in this morning’s sermon. You may be seated. So, do you remember your Confirmation Day? It is at a very awkward age, isn’t it, of all times? However, their conviction is quite strong, just as yours was. I was confirmed as an adult, so I did not have the benefit or blessing of their experience. Many of you also were confirmed as adults in the same. Regardless of whether you were confirmed as an adult or as a youth, you confessed some very vital and important truths on the day that you were confirmed. These young people here will also confess some very vital and important truths on this day. They will confess to you that God gave them in their baptism forgiveness of sins, deliverance from death and the devil, and eternal salvation. And you will say the same: that is what I received as well.
These youth will confess to you that they learned that not from their mind or reason, but only from the Scriptures. That the Holy Spirit revealed these truths to them because thus saith the Lord, it’s written down. They will also confess to you that with the help and grace of God, they will remain true to this faith until they die. That’s some heavy words for a middle schooler, but it is the only true faith, isn’t it? The Christian faith. And either we die as a believer in Christ or we don’t die; we die as a believer not in Christ. Either one, you will say the same.
Finally, they will also confess to you that they will, throughout their lives, as many of you heard them say over in Fellowship Hall this morning, that they will faithfully make use of these means of grace that God has given, his word and sacraments, or his means of grace, to grow in their faith. And that growth will not stop until God stops their hearts and takes them home. That’s what will be confessed to you. And you will be able to, at the same time, confess it in your heart again. This is most certainly true.
Now it’s interesting; you will see when the kids come up, they’re all different heights. Don’t you remember that? The girls shot up before we ever got taller guys. And it’s like, really? However, there are also some tall boys. They have different backgrounds, different upbringings, different places that they grew up and their parents grew up. But you know what? They are all one in Christ, just like you. For they and you are being knit together into one beautiful tapestry of God, Christ Jesus being the threads. You and they are being knitted together in one loaf of bread, and they partake with you in that same one loaf, joined to you and you joined to them. They are being crushed together as a cluster of grapes along with you into one cup of wine, and they will drink with you and eat with you and be combined into one, not because they have the same background, not because they grew up on the same part of town or listen to the same music or parents worked at the same job, but because of their faith in Christ Jesus. What you heard them say: we are brothers and sisters in Christ.
It is Christ that unifies us. It is not our language that unifies us. It is not our culture that unifies us. It is not even our ideology that unifies us, but our faith in Christ, the same Lord Jesus Christ, and the same saving faith is what unifies us. This kind of unity was given to Noah and to his family after the flood. They were the only human beings on the entire planet after all had been destroyed by the flood. And these eight people had the same gospel message, and they all spoke the same language. And God told them, after they had departed from the ark, to be scattered to all different parts of the world. Do not stay in one place. Go to other places and inhabit and populate and keep that gospel message with you as you go to different places. And so Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, all of that was settled by those eight people. But that wasn’t unity to them. They didn’t trust in that gospel message as being what unified them.
So somebody had a great bright idea. Why are we living together from one another so far when we could all live together because we speak the same language? That was in direct defiance of what God gave them the command to do. They in their minds said, you know God, your idea of unity, I don’t agree with. And so I think I can improve upon it. And my improvement is that I’m going to get together with my other fellow human beings in the same place. And we’re going to build a city. Right? We’re going to raise an architectural wonder of a tower, and we will be unified. But such a unity was man-made, wasn’t it? Their idea, their definition, and all of this effort of unity by sinful man came down to these two truths: either you listen to man’s truth and man’s word and become a child of the devil, or you listen to God’s word and God’s truth and become a child of God.
There is no third alternative. There is no, I’ll wait and see which one I appreciate more than the other because God says you either are with me or are against me. There is no third alternative. You either trust in, listen to, and believe in man’s word and man’s definitions, or you trust in, believe in, and find comfort in God’s word and God’s truth. It doesn’t mean that it always makes sense. I am sure that well-meaning men and women said, you know, this idea of unity, of getting together and moving to the plain of Shinar, which is in present-day Iraq, in Babylon, that’s a good idea. It seems like a good idea because we get to be together. But the problem was it wasn’t decades, but decades after the flood. And they have already begun to think in terms of what they think and not what God has revealed.
It is the same thing in this world. It is the same thing for these youth as they grow up. You, as parents and grandparents, worry about the world in which they are venturing into, and they will find the same thing that you found. It is either God’s truth and God’s word, or it’s man’s truth and man’s word. On this feast of Pentecost, did God do something amazing? For he took all of these different languages that were gathered in Jerusalem and, by grace, not by judgment, but by grace, enabled people who have never studied that specific language to speak it. And not to speak it so that they could create business opportunities, but to speak it so that they could proclaim Jesus and take it back to their countries.
Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamia, Cretans, Arabians, Phrygia, Pamphylia. All of those places did God give the gift of speaking in another known language to fix the judgment that occurred in the Old Testament reading. Jesus said it in a different way. He said, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word. And my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” If we honor God’s word, if we keep it, if we believe in it, we are beloved of God; we are children of God.
But Jesus also said, “Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.” Kind of like the people in the Old Testament reading. They did not honor God’s word. They thought that they could improve upon it. They thought that they could make something different that made sense to them and not let it be upon which they lay their heads down at night, but something other. And the word that you hear is not mine, but the Father’s who sent me, which means they dishonor the word of God. They do not keep it, and they do not believe it and they are, by default, a child of Satan.
True unity is not in language. True unity is not in skin color. True unity is not in a cultural background of European descent or African descent or Asian descent. Unity is found only in the one Lord Jesus Christ, the one true faith gathered in the one true church. There is unity. That is what these children have been given. And you heard what God’s going to do with them. By God’s grace, we pray, they’re going to spread just like Pentecost. Not all of them are going to be UT fans. They’re going to go elsewhere: A&M, Baylor, Tech, who knows where else. And with them will go the message that they have been given in their home by their parents. And with them will go what they have been supported in by you parish family members. And with them will go what they themselves have seen and heard in the Scriptures, and God will use them, no matter where that is. God will use them.
And their unity with us is in the same Christ, in the same faith, revealed in the same word. In the Pentecost revelation, Peter said, “…we hear them telling in our own language the mighty works of God.” Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Here is where we continue to grow up into him who is the head. For the Spirit said he will teach us all things. The Spirit said he will bring to remembrance all that Jesus has said to us. We are to entrust ourselves into his word. It’s not very easy, is it? When the pressure is put on by the majority of the people, as it was in the Old Testament reading, the majority of the people did not believe in what God had revealed, and they disagreed vehemently with Shem and Noah, that is, Japheth and Ham’s peoples.
The minority was against the majority. What do you do when the minority is against the majority of this world? You listen to what Jesus said to the disciples in our text. For he said, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Let them not be afraid.” As you let go of your babies, though they do not wish to be called that, they are young men and young women. As you let go of your babies, what other words do you have to entrust yourself except those? Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid, because Jesus said, “My peace I give you. My peace I leave with you.” Not because you feel this fuzzy, warm feeling within your bosom, but because in the midst of chaos—and teenage years are a little chaotic—in the midst of all the years that you see in your life and in your children’s and grandchildren’s life, in spite of it all, you can cry out like Peter and Paul as they die to martyr’s death and say, “In spite of what I’m seeing happening to me, God is gracious because of that man who is God in the flesh, sacrificed for me, that I may be pleasing in the Father’s sight.” That’s peace.
Peace that cannot be apprehended except by faith. So, either we are at peace with God and at war with the devil, or we are at peace with the devil and at war with God. You young people, you friends and family members, you fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, you are at peace with God because of Christ Jesus. That is the language of the Father to you, spoken through Jesus Christ and revealed always by His Holy Spirit. You are at peace with God. In the name of Jesus, Amen. The peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
