Dear friends, I preached this sermon on June 19, 1986 in the Chapel of the Cross in Northwestern Hall on the campus of Luther Seminary in St Paul. I was serving as the seminary's first Director of Admissions at the time. I wrote this sermon using my ancient Olympia manual typewriter; this is the first time I have published this message from 37 years ago. I dedicate this post to the memory of six seminary faculty who also preached during the same summer session of 1986: Paul Knutson, Eugene Kreider, Donald Juel, James Nestingen, Terry Fretheim and Paul Sonnack. God bless their memory!
May God also bless our memory of the Chapel of the Cross which was decommissioned in 2021.
CHAPEL SERMON
Luther Northwestern
Seminary
June 19, 1986
This may sound strange to you, but for most of my life I’ve had the habit of daydreaming during Sunday morning worship.
When I was a little boy I recall getting distracted during “church” by questions like…what would happen if a gigantic bumblebee swooped through that little open window by the organ some Sunday and stung the preacher on the nose smack dab in the middle of communion…and why it was that one of the stained glass windows along the pulpit side of the church featured a hand raised in something that looked like the Boy Scout salute—when our congregation didn’t even have a scout troop, let alone “believe” in scouting.
When I was young my Sunday morning daydreaming tended to be about very tangible, concrete matters…like what in the world a “Holy Ghost” might look like…and how in the world a Holy Ghost could conceive a baby…and what phrases like “temporal and eternal punishment”…”extol the stem of Jesse’s rod”…and “meet, right and salutary” meant…and what actually went on in that little football huddle that gathered up front around the baptismal font every once in a while, what did those people do to make that poor, helpless baby scream so hard, I wondered?
I guess I’ve always had the habit of day-dreaming during Sunday morning worship…and as I’ve grown older, gone to seminary and gotten ordained my day-dreaming hasn’t really diminished…though it may have become a bit more theologically sophisticated…
…so that now I sing hymns like this one…and wonder after verse 3 what that one little word that subdues the devil might actually be.
“Though hordes of devils fill the land all threatening to devour us, we tremble not, unmoved we stand; they cannot overpower us. Let this world’s tyrant rage; in battle we’ll engage! His might is doomed to fail; God’s judgment must prevail. ONE LITTLE WORD SUBDUES HIM!”
The third verse of this majestic hymn conjured up in my mind an image of Martin Luther, holed up in his Wartburg Castle study, surrounded by stacks of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, in a cold sweat because he’s constipated as usual, his kidney stones are paining him again, and worst of all those old doubts, questions and anxieties are crashing in upon him.
Verse three of this hymn causes me to envision this tormented soul…groping, grasping for a blunt object to be flung in self-defense at a shadow where the devil seems to be lurking.
What word did Luther utter while simultaneously flinging his trusty inkwell at the Tempter? What, for Luther, might have been that “one little word” that subdues the Evil One?
There are, I suppose, a host of obvious possibilities…in-house, Reformation language, code words, incantations (if you will) that we Lutherans might try out in an exorcism if we ever got roped into doing an exorcism.
For instance there’s that all-time favorite word “grace”…as in the ever-present “Grace Lutheran Church”, “saved by grace” and that popular whipping-boy of ours, “cheap grace.” It just could be that “grace” is all that needs to be said to force Satan into beating a hasty retreat…
…but then again, there are plenty of other, equally-likely possibilities. The one little word that makes the devil go gaa-gaa could be “justification”…or “cross” (as in “theology of the ______”)….or that all-purpose answer seminarians put down on test papers when they don’t know the real answer: “JESUS!” “Jesus” could be the one little word that stops Lucifer dead in his tracks….
….but I have my doubts. I don’t think that even “Jesus” is the word…any more than “grace” or “justification” or “cross” or any other in-house, Reformation code word is the word, the one little word that drives the diabolos dingy!
You can repeat all those good words until you’re blue in the face, after all, and absolutely nothing will happen…because as good ad as true and as beautiful as those words might be…none of them have the power actually to “deliver the goods”…
…and Luther knew that. He didn’t discover or concoct or create any one of those words…any more than he was the first person to read the Epistle to the Romans! But what Luther did discover (or, perhaps we should say, what discovered Luther!) was a whole new way of hearing all those old familiar words, so that a new creation, so that entirely new people might emerge from the hearing of those words.
It is to that entirely new way of hearing the gospel that we must attend if we want to ferret out the one little word that subdues Satan…
….and when we do so we’re going to be surprised to discover that the conjunctions, the prepositions, and the pronouns are the words that really pack a wallop.
What is the one little word, anyway?
Maybe it’s a word like “nevertheless”…a “conjunctive adverb” (according to my dictionary) that signals fresh possibilities on dead-end streets, hope in despair, a “yes” in the face of every “no.”
What is the one little word?
It could be a strategically placed “because” where we’d normally expect to see a great big “if”…a strategically placed “because” that turns us away from our dour introspection, toward instead the mighty acts of One who even before we shifted out of neutral had already acted to save us.
What is the one little word that spells the end for the devil?
It just might be that harmless, taken-for-granted, misused and abused pronoun “YOU”…attached, though, to a promise spoken by one flesh-and-blood human being to another in the name of and with the authority of the crucified and risen Lord.
If I had to settle on just one word, I’d bet my whole wad on that little pronoun.
The one word, I have a hunch…the one little word the devil will do anything to stifle because he knows it’ll cook his goose is that word “you”—attached to a promise of the Gospel:
Zaccheus, come down; I must eat with you, in your house today.
You did not choose me, but I chose you…
Your sins are forgiven…
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to
you…
Lo, I am with you always even to the close
of the age.
That one little bugger of a word “you” cuts through all the mustard, slices through all the verbiage, bursts through all the ways we attempt to keep God under wraps, at arm’s length…all the ways we try to maintain a safe distance between ourselves and the dynamite of the gospel.
That word, that one stinking little word attached to a promise spoken for Christ, by Christ, actually delivers the goods, does the good news, opens up the future, creates a new world and new people…
…all of which is not to deny for one second that it’s a dangerous little word. The evil one hates that little word so much that he’s been known to have certain sayers of it crucified…and every preacher I know of, myself included, struggles to actually say it in all its risky, scandalous splendor…
…which is why I’d bet my bottom dollar that it actually is the one little word that subdues the devil…knocks him and us out of the driver’s seat…because it’s the one little word that can make a sermon more than a lecture on our spiritual and moral possibilities…it’s the one little word that finally hooks us, gets down under our skin, anchoring us in a love that’ll never let us go. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit….I declare unto you the entire forgiveness of all your sins….This is the body and blood of Christ, for you….Jesus crucified, dead, buried and risen…so that you might live the life you were created for—trusting God, loving, your neighbors, caring for the earth.”
“You”…a toothless, three-letter, nickel and dime pronoun…until, that is, it’s used to single out and name the recipient, the receiver, the hearer of a promise of Christ. Then that pitiful little pronoun becomes more explosive than the combined megatonnage of all this world’s nuclear arsenals….
…for it’s that gospel-promise “YOU” that makes it possible for good-for-nothings to believe otherwise about themselves….
…it’s that gospel-promise “YOU” uttered in a Russian Orthodox baptismal liturgy that frees beleaguered believers to recognize the true super-power to whom they’ve been consigned forever….
…it’s that gospel-promise “YOU” heard at communion rails in Soweto Township that empowers folks to hope and struggle and live on in the face of oppression.
…it’s that gospel-promise “YOU” that frees farmers facing foreclosure to continue in their calling to till and keep the land.
…it’s -promise “YOU” that lets hope take root on hospital oncology wards…
…it’s that gospel-promise “YOU” that stirs me from my apathetic, complacent stupor…
…it’s that gospel-promise “YOU” that will see you through your seminary education, that will undergird you in your ministry, that will sustain you in your life.
And you don’t have just my word on that, either!
You have God’s Word on it!
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
