Here is my write-up on last Sunday’s LCMS service that I attended.
A. The youth pastor asked us if we collect anything. He said that, as
a man entering his 40s, he enjoys collecting Pokemon. He has thousands
of them. I have heard the name, but I have no idea what it is.
The youth pastor said that Mary collected something. Luke 2:19, 51
states that Mary treasured her experiences of Jesus in her heart. He
continued to speculate that perhaps Luke received information about the
nativity from Mary herself. Similarly, we can treasure in our hearts our
experiences of Jesus.
B. The pastor has been doing a series entitled “Jesus, Son of….”
Today, the sermon’s title was “Jesus, Son of Mary.” The pastor did not
talk a whole lot about Mary, but he did engage the Immanuel passages in
the Book of Isaiah and discussed the incarnation.
The pastor opened with a personal anecdote. He shares the same first
and last name with a cousin, who also is a LCMS pastor. A woman from
LCMS was accusing the pastor at the LCMS that I attend of lying to her
because she read about him, and the bulletin had different information
about his wife’s name and how many kids he had from what he had told
her. The pastor replied that she is mixing him up with his cousin, who
has the same first and last name.
The pastor asked if we have the right Jesus this holiday season. Some
people see Jesus as a lawgiver. Some have a hard time forgiving, so
they assume that Jesus was reluctant to forgive, requiring all sorts of
hurdles (i.e., repentance) to be traversed before he would forgive a
person. Jesus met us where we are through the incarnation, experiencing
what we experience as humans, and he meets us in our unforgiveness and
false images of him, lavishing on us his mercy, which hopefully
encourages us to forgive. We might fear that Immanuel would come in
wrath: rebuking Ahaz for his faithlessness (Isaiah 7), or sending the
Assyrians to decimate Judah (Isaiah 8:8). But Immanuel is merely Jesus’s
title: his name is Jesus, which relates to salvation.