"One With Christ Jesus"

When you do find the occasional person who remembers some of their world history or knows a little church history, they’ll say, "Lutherans. You’re the ones who broke away from the Catholic Church, right? Martin Luther and the Reformation and all that."

Of course, we’re glad they remember that without connecting us to Martin Luther King or looking at us like we’re some kind of a member of a cult. At least they’ve got the Martin Luther and the Reformation part right. But being Lutheran is hardly about breaking away from the Catholic Church. If fact, we are the catholic church – at least part of it.

A lot of people who don’t know us very well do know about the Reformation, and we celebrate it every year on October 31^st, the day we call Reformation Day. But even many Lutherans don’t know much about the day we’ll mark again tomorrow. June 25^th – a huge day in Reformation history, and a day that maybe more than any other day defines what we Lutherans are.

On June 25^th, 1530, the Lutheran theologians, government officials, Dukes and Princes from Germany presented their carefully written confession of faith to Emperor Charles V, a Catholic, at the Diet, or council, of Augsburg, in Augsburg Germany. The Augsburg Confession is the document that first officially laid out what Lutherans believe and what it means to be Lutheran.

The Augsburg Confession was not about breaking away from the Catholic Church, or breaking up the Church. The writers of the Augsburg Confession emphasized agreements with Rome rather than the differences from Rome. In the preface to the Confession they wrote: We…are prepared to discuss…all possible ways and means by which we may come together…In this way, dissentions may be put away without offensive conflict.

The Lutherans boldly and clearly stated what they believed so there could be a basis for real agreement around the truth. They didn’t want to split the church – they wanted to unite it – unite it in the one truth of God’s Word, unite it in the one Christ.

As it turned out, declaring for everyone to hear and read what we believe did set us apart from the Roman Catholic Church – especially our clear confession in Article IV that we are justified, given forgiveness of sins and eternal life, not by anything we do, but by God’s grace, for the sake of Jesus’ death on the cross, and that those things are ours through faith. They’re ours by simply believing.

Obviously that didn’t happen. Obviously it hasn’t happened. The Christian church is fragmented, not just between Lutherans and Catholics, but between hundreds of denominations. Yet, in our text this morning, Paul says that we Christians are all one in Christ Jesus.

Listen again to 3:26-28: "For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

How can that be? What does it mean to say we are all one in Christ Jesus?

Anyone can tell by looking that we Christians aren’t all one. The Handbook of Denominations, a book on American church bodies lists at least 202 groups in the United States alone that might be called Christian. Some of them probably wouldn’t seem too strange to us. We could walk into a Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian Church and not feel too uncomfortable. On the other hand, I’m not sure what we would make of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, or the Church of God of Prophecy, or the Social Brethren Church. I don’t think they’d be quite like what we’re used to. It would probably be hard to think of them as one with us.

Even among Lutherans it’s hard to think of ourselves as one. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (the ELCA) affirms the Augsburg Confession, celebrates tomorrows big day, just like we do. But this summer it celebrates ten years of full communion with the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ, and for the last seven years, with the Episcopal Church in the United States.

That means that ELCA members and pastors may commune and serve in any of those churches and vice versa. The problem is that these church bodies confess that Christ’s body and blood are not really present and distributed to those who partake in the Lord’s Supper, but are only symbolized by the bread and wine. Those churches have all declared oneness, but that’s driven Lutheran bodies further apart. By declaring oneness with others, the ELCA has moved farther away from the LCMS and other Lutherans who cling to

Even within our own Synod, we are not all one. Our Synodical convention that happens every three years will take place in about three weeks in Houston. You can bet there will be diversity. Some of it will be the wonderful diversity of Caucasian, African American, Asian, Hispanic, between pastors and teachers and laypeople.

Some of the diversity will be differences of opinion on how best to fulfill the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations. And that’s not all bad – nobody has all the good ideas. But some of the differences will be real theological differences, and those differences must be addressed, because truth cannot stand beside error. With that kind of diversity, how can we say we are all one in Christ?

You know – down deep inside – our gut tells us that we’re not one. Doesn’t something inside tell you that you aren’t even one with yourself? Are you always of one mind? Are you always undivided in your devotion to the Lord? Don’t you sometimes do the things you know you shouldn’t, thing you really don’t want to do? Don’t you struggle with temptation? Maybe your conscience says no, but your greed or your glands say, "Go!" What does it mean to say we’re all one in Christ Jesus when we’re not even one with ourselves?

The reason for our internal conflict is sin. Inside every Christian, there’s a war going on. We’re sinner and saint at the same time. The good we want to do, we don’t do. The evil we don’t want to do, we do. As long as we are sinners and Christians all at the same time, the struggle won’t go away.

The reason we aren’t one with ourselves is because Christians can never be one with sin. The believer in us can never make peace with the sinner inside. In turn, the reason we’re not one with all other Christians is because the same conflict is going on inside everybody else.

Sin shows itself in false teachings, false beliefs, and false doctrines. All the different denominations, for the most part, don’t exist because of politics or personal squabbling. We may never allow ourselves to be one with them sin, but we love every one of these Christians. Since Christians can never be one with sin, we pray that those who hold to false teachings or practices will understand the truth and repent.

Now, I guess it sounds like there’s no hope that we Christians – even we Missouri Synod Lutherans – could ever be one. But Paul says to us; "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Somehow we are one in Christ Jesus.

Remember the very first expression of the Gospel – way back in the Garden of Eden? God spoke those words for Adam and Eve, but he addressed them to the devil. Remember what God said? The first expression of the Gospel was that we would be at enmity with evil – enemies of evil, not one with sin.

By sinning, we made ourselves one with sin. But God saw to it that things didn’t stay that way. He drove a wedge between us and evil. That wedge was the wooden wedge of the cross. And the deeper the wedge, the deeper the cross penetrates, the further we are pushed from sin.

In our Baptisms, a clean break from sin was made. St. Paul reminds us in Romans 6 that we died to sin. By Jesus’ cross, given to us when we were baptized, all of our sins are forgiven. By this forgiveness that we have in Christ, we are now one. "For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God, through faith." Wherever sin is forgiven, we are one. Wherever sin remains, separation must remain.

The beauty thing is that even with Christians from whom we must remain outwardly separated; we are one, because all true Christians – all who truly believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection has saved them – are forgiven, even though they may hold to false doctrines.

The confessors at Augsburg knew this. They knew they weren’t writing a new document to start a new Church, or for just a small segment of the Church. They were confessing the truly catholic faith. That’s right – the "little c" catholic faith. Catholic means universal, the whole Christian Church.

The Augsburg Confession is above all else, a confession of Christ, the one Christ, the one in whom all believers have eternal life. The one holy Christian church consists of a couple of billion free and individual souls, scattered in hundreds of denominations.

We may look like a bunch of independent countries each going its own way, but the forgiveness we have in our Baptism into Christ has made us one. May we each hold on to that truth until the day when we will truly be one in heaven. Amen.